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I’ve gone for weeks at a time this summer unplugged from the internet – from my online commitments, my websites and blogs, facebook and emails.  Not only that, but I’ve been without cell service too!    Talk about a big shock.  You do know who’s blog you are reading, right?

I’m not gonna lie, I think my nerves were rattled for a few days as I found myself pacing around in circles wondering what in the heck I was going to do with all this time that I now possessed.  So, what does this list-maker do?  I made a list of the four things that I was going to do every day.

1.  Read the Bible every morning. 

2.  Spend quality time playing with the kids. 

3.  Read a book from my list of classics for two hours.

4.  Go outside or get some exercise.

These were the things that I wanted to accomplish every day on my six week vacation.  And so far, so good.  I know that I am extremely blessed to be able to step away from my every day obligations, literally step half of the country away, and just BE.

Rejuvating my body in nature, my soul with the word of the Lord, my mind with the great classics and my sense of humor with my children and husband has given me a new perspective on the tangeable things that matter to me the most.  It has given me a clear vision again of what it means to live a life of balance.  Isn’t this what us moms are always claiming we have to do well? 

Balance.

We’ve lived as a unit again, without the distractions of the communication highway.  We’ve lived a solitary summer and we’re coming back changed.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

-Emerson

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Packing for a road trip for seven individuals is gruelling work.  It takes a lot of pre-thought to make sure that nothing gets left behind.  Like the time we went to the Georgia mountains this past year only to discover that ALL five children left their toothbrushes in the bathroom instead of their toiletry bags. 

Toothbrushes are NOT cheap.

Toothbrushes X 5 aren’t cheap either!  And, the cheap ones all come in the same colors, so we couldn’t color code them per child.  It was a mess.  Right there in the grocery isle.  After considering the finger brushing trick for about a minute I realized that it wasn’t a good solution for five days.

When we go on road trips, staying in different hotels each night poses a little problem of luggage.  It’s a big pain to lug in seven bags in and out of hotels each night and morning.  With my bin system, we carry in one bin and each person carries in their backback with their toiletry bag, books, stuffed animals, special novelties and items that they can’t live without.
I came up with a bin system several years ago.
My bin system is easily replicated each year, I just change the destination labels and begin packing.

The System:

1. In each bin we can fit two days worth of clothes.  So, I make labels according to how many days we are going to be on the road there and back.  This year it was nine days there and nine days back.  I made eight labels.

The first day that we leave doesn’t count towards the bin system because our clothes are on our body already.

2. We jointly pack our belongings for two days per bin.  Shirts, jeans, socks, hair bows, swimming suits, belts, jammies etc…  We carefully consider what we will need for that day.  For example, one day we will be hanging out at the lake with family, so we packed swimsuits and cover-ups.
3. The things we do NOT pack in the bins are shoes, toiletries and extra things that we will wear/use when we reach our final destination such as church clothes, hiking shoes, sleeping bags etc…  I have a separate bin for shoes.  Each child has their own toiletry bag in their back pack, equipped with toothbrushes this time!!
4. At the time of the bin filling, if I run across items that aren’t ready to be put in the bins then I make a list of what still needs to be added before we launch.  That’s what those pieces of paper are in front of the bins below.

See how our bins have grown!

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As I’m making plans for teaching high school world history next year I will be putting together some lil’ helpers for my students.  And, of course, I’m planning on sharing them with my friends too!

Although this timeline can be used with any age/grade.  I have chosen to use the Annotated Mona Lisa as our art history spine which is appropriate for middle school through college.  The timeline is created specifically for this book, with the headings of each section so that the student can follow along in the book as he takes notes.

The main goal of this timeline is to have the student interacting with the book as he reads.  He is expected to write down the dates (they are not given on the timeline), take notes as he reads each section, and write the name of the artist under the example picture given plus any other artists he wants to remember from that time period.

Annotated Mona Lisa Timeline-Yr1

How I plan on awarding 1/2 credit of art history to my students:

1. I will expect them to read two sections a week and after wards fill out the above timeline.
2. They will color an appropriate picture from Art Masterpieces to Color: 60 Great Paintings from Botticelli to Picasso from the time period they are reading from.
3. With the remaining nine or so weeks left over they will be writing a report on a topic such as:  biography of an artist,  explanation of a specific art movement,  comparing and contrasting two artists or movements, the effects of art on society, how religion effected art
4. A final project will be expected to be worked on during the last semester consisting of one of the following:

• Powerpoint or other audio/visual presentation at least 3 1/2 minutes long
• Four minute expository speech with visuals
• Completed art piece in the style of the artist or genre that paper was written about
• Display board with pictures and new information besides what was in report
• Other approved project idea

In Florida I can award 1/2 credit  after approximately 60 hours have been dedicated to a subject.  This includes class time, lecture time, reading, preparing, writing, and delivering the project.   I have chosen these assignments while keeping this in mind.

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Last summer for our family vacation, we decided to tour the Eastern states and see all the historical sites on our way up to visit my parents in Vermont. We hadn’t been that far as a family before and it was a BIG deal to be able to do this, especially for a homeschooling family! There were tons of places that I wanted to stop, so I began researching.

Weeks later, we had an itinerary.  We were going to drive through the  majority of the first 13 colonies, so I started preliminary packing (in my head)….then IT struck me. What on earth were all 5 kids going to do for 4-9 hours every day in the car?

Were we crazy? I was ready to call it off.

As I began thinking about all the things to occupy time in the car it dawned on me. Wait, we are homeschoolers! Give us a notebook, blank notebooking pages, fun worksheets, stickers, maps, podcasts, cool markers and pens and we’ll make a Summer Vacation notebook. In the style of how we study everything else – notebooking!

I found many resources online and here are a few that pertained to our trip and could pertain to any family vacation driving up the Eastern coast:

• Enchanted Learning states pages
• Enchanted Learning state flags
• Vacation memory book (I enlarged and modified this)
• 13 colonies – label them
• Liberty bell info
• Label the airplane (for DC Air and Space museum) or Wright Bros. museum
• Looking at Airplains, National Air and Space Museum
• I downloaded numerous free podcasts from Colonial Williamsburg
• Colonial Williamsburg coloring and activity book
• History Scribe notebooking pages (I already had this)
• Jamestown replica, free print out
• Printed out games like Road Trip Bingo, Scavenger Hunt and Battle Ship from Moms Mini Van

I also made sure there were these things in each notebook:

• Blank pages for drawing and writing
• Page protectors to slide postcards, National Parks ranger worksheets, and brochures in
• A pencil case with markers, stickers, stamps and other goodies
• Printouts of maps of our destinations like Jamestown, Williamsburg, Monticello, National Air and Space museum etc. so we could plan our activities before we arrived
• List of podcasts and Cd’s we could listen to for each state

* Note:  This post was originally written for Heart of the Matter Online in 2008.  It was modified for my blog.  We have since created another vacation notebook for 2009 and I will be posting links to what we used in an upcoming post.

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My dear friends, Barb and Molly, sent me emails this past week checking in with me because they hadn’t seen much going on over here.  You ladies are so sweet.  Thank you for reminding me to post something….anything!  I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve forgotten about my bloggy friends.  You sure do know how to make someone feel loved.

So, here’s a few things that have been going on with us!

My oldest son turned 14! We took the whole family plus a couple of his friends camping at a spring nearby.  We had an absolute blast and he is such a joy to be around.  I love being his mom.

This little guy is a sponge.  He just soaks in everything that is going on around him and everything in his life is an adventure.  Here he is making us spaghetti while we do our morning school routine.  And then he’s making spiders with playdough and pipe cleaners counting their legs..1..2..3..4..5..6..7..8.

We’ve been winding down some of our subjects getting ready for a change of pace this summer.  We school year round (sorry to repeat this, but some of you may not know this).  So, in the summers we do lots of fun things that we don’t get to do during the other months like sight-seeing, traveling, science kits that have been lurking from the shelves and history books that we’ve skipped over.

Here we are at a cabin in the Georgia mountains, right before dark. The kids were getting ready for a glow-in-the-dark sword fight. We hiked, played pool, gem mined and relaxed a bit with friends. You can see more pictures of our trip on my facebook page.

I took my princess to see a ballet, Sleeping Beauty, for a mother daughter day.  I try to sneak in time for us to do girly things, otherwise she may not know how a young lady should act with all these snotty nose boys around.  (They don’t really have snotty noses, except one right now ’cause he has a cold.)

My middle child, The Inventor has been busy building things like mouse traps and candy machines thanks to his Grandma that supplies him with bags of junk recycled objects and lessons in physics.  It is really handy having a Grandma that was a gifted science teacher come over to “play” with the children.  They always look forward to their time with her.  She knows how to make learning not boring.  I’m so thankful for her and her time that she gives her grandchildren.

My artsy son has been spending his free time making collages that he hopes to sell on Etsy.  He has a whole line.

He also writes, produces, edits and burns copies of movies on a weekly basis.  He and his older brother have some pretty funny scripts that they are working on right now.  It’s not uncommon for me to find weird things laying around that are “props”.  I found a half melted stick of butter and a butter knife in a zip locked bag in the fridge one day.  Ummmm, yuck!  Who wants to use that? They come to “class” with red stains on their skin from blood wounds because they just shot a battle scene.  And just this morning I yelled, “Who left the white wig in the backyard?  It’s getting ready to rain!”

I love my life.

Don’t get me wrong, dear friends, there is plenty of hectic stuff going on around here too.  But, I’d rather make you laugh then pity my life with five children.

I’ve been a reading maniac lately.  This is part of the reason that I haven’t been blogging.  I’ve been reading these books:

• How to Read a Book – funny title, but EXCELLENT!
• Invitation to the Classics – good overview of the classics
• The Discoverers – by my new favorite author, Boorstin
• The Book Thief – for book club
• Composition in the Classical Tradition – cause I’m nuts and decided it was time to learn how to teach the progymnasmata to my high schooler
• and a handful of others that I haven’t finished yet, in preparation for history next year

I know it’s a long update and if you stuck with me then please leave a comment so I can send you a personal congratulations!!  But, I don’t know when I will post again next, so I figured I’d make it a long one.

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