Year 8, Week 10: Writing

     This past week was filled with a lot of prep work on my part.  A lot of making double batches of meals to have and freeze.  A lot of running errands and gathering supplies.  A lot of dropping off and picking up books.  A lot of research and writing.  You might be wondering why I'm researching and writing and what the extra meals and supplies are all about, but I'll get to that in a bit.

     Let me share what my kids are doing for writing this school year first.  A380 is using Writing & Rhetoric, a program that I have come to love after trying a couple of different ones over the years.  This is one that the kids also enjoy so that's a bonus.  I work with A380 on his writing but for Little Toughie I wanted to change it up.  I wanted to challenge her this year so I signed her up for an online class through Circe (By the way, they have classes for adults too.  I took a Socratic class in the spring.)  I felt it would be good for her to have a different teacher; to get a different perspective and a different teaching style.  They both get to read great stories and then write their own.  I've kept copies of all their work and it's interesting to see how their writing has progressed.  One of these days, with their permission, perhaps I'll share some of it!

     As for all the running amok around remember that project I've been waiting to announce?  Here it is:  I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo (My husband calls it nanu-nanu!)  Basically, I'm going to draft a new novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days.  As you can tell, I'm a big fan of books.  I love to read but I also have a passion for writing; a passion I haven't really nurtured except for blogging.

     Every now and then a story will come to mind, but I'd let it go, believing that there's no way I could write that story.  However, at the beginning of this year I had a story that kept coming to mind so I started to write it.  When Covid hit my focus shifted to other things and so the writing stopped.  Early in October I remembered NaNoWriMo and decided to sign up.  I've read that it can be pretty time consuming considering that you only have 30 days to reach the goal.  I've spent the past few weeks prepping as much as I can, down to a rough outline, some aspects of my characters and researching settings.  Even now, as I write this I'm participating in an online writing forum filled with challenges and Q&A.

     It's not too late to join!  You can be a panster, a writer who writes by the seat of their pants and doesn't plot or plan when writing their novels.  I'm a planster...someone who plans a bit of it and will write it as it comes.  If you join, let me know.  We can be writing buddies!

     I have to go.  I have a 5 minute writing sprint to attend to and I'm already one minute behind.  Have a great week!  Oh, and A380 says, "Have a happy halloween!"

We're Back and It's Box Day! (Sort of)

Hey there!  Thank you for taking a few minutes to read my nonsense. Well, not nonsense...perhaps musings on homeschooling or the ramblings of a mom who's had a long week and needs an outlet other than exercise to release said ramblings.  Regardless, I'm going to try to get back to writing weekly.  Over the years I haven't been able to keep up with it because our school days started to fill with more than I could handle and I had to choose between keeping this updated or honestly, losing my Bible study time.  And I know there's no way I could homeschool without spending quality time with the Father.  So, there you have it.

Now, in this current season things have slowed a bit.  Plus there's a couple of other reasons.  One, my Little Toughie is starting what would be considered middle school and I would like to get back on track with documenting what we're doing.  The tracking will also help us plan out her high school years 😬.  Plus, for A380, this is a transition year where I get to focus more on the skills necessary for his success and I'll get to document that.  The second part, and only some of my immediate family know this, is that I'm writing a book.  I already have the ending of it outlined and partially written, but to hone my writing skills I have to write!

Moving along...It took some time for us to plan what middle school would look like for our tween.  We had completed all four history cycles (and then some) as per The Well Trained Mind and I knew come high school our focus would move to studying current ideologies/events or 20th Century History or Church History or perhaps the History of Science but I didn't know how to fill the gap until then.  Thankfully, we decided to go back to Sonlight, which is what I used my first year homeschooling Little Toughie in Kindergarten.  Basically, we'll be doing all four cycles again but condensed into two years and it's heavily literature based.  As a bibliophile I love that there's a lot of reading.  But then again, there's A LOT of reading.  See:

For Box Day I'd typically lay out EVERYTHING and take a picture of it like in this post, but with The Principal working from home and the dog zooming around, it just wasn't feasible.  These are just some of the books. 😲  These are the ones I was able to get through and add as resources to my digital planner so that I could set up their schedule, mostly the history books.  We still have our Bible study books, additional science materials and various other books for spelling, writing and vocabulary.  I'm running out of shelves y'all.  I think we need to build an additional room!

We start on Monday, August 10 and I hope to post every Friday (or Saturday).  We'll see how it goes.