So, how do you like the iPad we got you, Dad?

Thanks for sending this, Grandma!  Love it!

Grandma's 100th!

Five generations having fun in Iowa together

 Best friends for 17 years 

My cute parents

Phoebe and her Great Great Grandma, who has amazingly strong nails

Thanks to my Dad who took tons of great pictures so the rest of us could enjoy the moment.  See his collection of the party here.  I could not have had a better time with Chrisie and my family!  She came with me to the 100th birthday party.  I got to see family I hadn't seen for a really long time.  I made up secret handshakes with two of my younger cousins, talked homeschooling with fellow homeschooling relatives and of course talked about everything under the sun with my best bud.  Love love loved this past weekend.

Learning adventures

 Ezra at Classical Conversations dissecting a crayfish. The little ones participated too!  

Learning opportunities like this keep me motivated when I'm feeling crazy the night before prepping our bags and making snacks and lunches till I'm about to fall over.  Don't forget their tin whistles!

Classical Conversations is a private home school group that meets for a half day each week to introduce new material that families take home and practice throughout the week as well as do science, art/music and public speaking in a group setting. And Ezra's favorite, RECESS!!  The majority of the information is presented and learned throughout the week in song format.

We do our own reading, writing and arithmetic curricula at home and utilize Classical Conversations as our foundation curriculum for all other subjects at this time: History, Geography, Science, Math (fact memorization, like conversion tables and multiplication tables), Latin, and English Grammar.  I'm taking this one year at a time and have not decided yet if we will participate in Classical Conversations (CC) again next year (it's a bit pricey).  I'm very impressed, however, at the junior high and high school levels of academics that CC offers. I find it reminiscent of my British high school experience.  I'm still a big fan of Charlotte Mason methods and find it complementary in its gentle/nature based approach.

Ezra, my future refrigerator sales man (his choice), is doing well with it and loves the weekly presentations he gets to give.  Juni (who wants to save babies and be a mermaid) likes the music and can skip count her sixes and sing Latin noun endings with the best of them, even though her participation is not compulsory.  I wrestle with the need to memorize so much so young, at times, and make sure they are having lots of opportunities to just be kids outside of the once a week meeting.

If anyone was interested in doing the foundations level Classical Conversations curriculum cheaply, they could simply buy the CDs and play them when they were in the car.  But, for us, right now, that would take all the fun out of it.  Someday, we too may be this cool:

One can dream, right?