Quote For The Week:

“Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” ~Helen Keller

I can’t believe it has been 7 weeks since I posted a Weekly Wrap-Up and that in 3 weeks we will hit the mid point of our school year! We have been so busy that I have found my blog taking a back burner. 🙁 I have been working to change that with the coming of the New Year and the promise of the holiday season being over.

We are excited to have a couple of big trips in the works for this coming Spring. We will be taking a 2 week vacation to Florida where we will experience Universal Studios for the first time, and we will be taking a 4 day trip to Washington D.C for Chloe’s “8th Grade Washington Trip”. I will have more posts on our planning stages for our D.C. trip in the coming weeks.

This was a short week due to New Year’s Day falling on a Tuesday. Thus we started back on Wednesday after a two week break for the holidays. It is always hard to start back after a break like this but I am surprised to be able to sit here on Friday and state that it wasn’t too bad. 🙂

Wednesday: Now that the holidays are over and we are in the middle of the cold, snow season, I am adding more things into our schedule. We are going to be completing part one of the KidCoder Windows Programming that we started last year. I wrote two reviews on it that you can find, here & here. I am also getting Chloe back in to doing more writing, thus we are starting back to Writing Strands again.

Today we did an art project called Paper Silhouettes that I will have a full post on in a couple of days. (I will come back and link it here when it is done and up.)

Thursday: We are spending this year exploring the United States, from geography, to government and elections. I recently found this great resource for a fun and interactive overview of the 50 States. It is a series called “The States” from the History Channel. They cover each state briefly, including major landmarks, facts, important people and history from each state.  I also created printable notebook sheets that include a blank map of each state, and lined paper on the back to include any important facts that the kids want to remember from each state.  I will be adding a more in-depth post about this, including a free printable pdf of my notebooking pages in the coming weeks.  (I will come back and link it here when it is done and up.)

Friday:  Here in NY we actually have snow right now!  We got more than a foot on Christmas night and we have added an inch or two here and there throughout the past week.  Thus we are taking advantage of the snow while we have it.  The kids have been playing outside and going sledding.  Yesterday we spent an hour and a half scraping the multiple inches of ice off our driveway!