Week of Firsts

This week, with the weather warming up so nicely, we took up one of our outdoor loves: Geocaching.  When I mentioned on Facebook that we were going to go Geocaching, a friend taught me about  Letterboxing.  I had to look it up and was immediately intrigued.  So the two younger boys and I went on our first letterboxing adventure. 

We first had to stop at Hobby Lobby to gather some basic materials, as a stamp and ink are essential to successful Letterboxing.  We bought a basic stamp (from the clearance aisle) and agreed on a metalic silver ink for stamping.  In addition, we found three leather bound 3x5 notebooks with an elastic band to use as our Letterboxing "passports" (one for each boy; I already owned one I wished to use).   Yesterday we took Ashleigh and John too and had a great time introducing them to the activity.

While at Hobby Lobby we also picked up the materials to make simple handmade rubber stamps-- and they turned out fantastic!   You can visit our art blog to see them.

John will be trying out for the Challenge Program here in Texas next month, so right now we are working on getting his packet/application together.  We chose to do this because we feel his need for self confidence would be fulfulled in the area of school.  His personal goal is to get into shape.

For John, we had him tested and enrolled him in Sylvan.  However the program is too costly for us to continue.  So, knowing that math wise he is at about 5/6th grade level, I've enrolled him in the same program that James and Nick have been using this year: Time4Learning .  Honestly, he is doing so well at Sylvan, that I think his "lack of math" skills is based on a lack of desire to "get it" and he may not take tests well either.

This week we started focusing on our writing again.  John had a shortstory assignment that we went through and worked on the puncuation and grammer.  He did really well on his own, and the areas that he need work became very obvious.  Very helpful.  Ashleigh finished her manuscript a few months ago and has been editing the entire thing.  I am her final editor and we finished the first three chapters.  Today, as a matter of fact, we are going to draft a query letter to submit to an agent.  James and Nick finally! finished their writing round robin from last October and I have assigned a new one to be done by next Friday.

The writing round robin is edited before publishing.  This gives us an opportunity to work on our grammer, spelling, and story structure skills.  Their personal blogs, a modern day version of a journal, are left as they themselves write it.  Both exercises offer insights, as time flows, into their growth as writers.