Immersed!

What a beautiful day! On a day as beautiful day, things should be expected to go as smoothly as they did today. I got up (not early!) and walked 1.5 miles on the treadmill. Brian was off today and he was outside working by the time I got out of the shower. The kids and I had cereal for breakfast. I spent breakfast multi-tasking by catching up on the email I haven't had a chance to read all weekend. It wasn't because of baseball that I didn't have time for a change, though. We did some cleaning. I got Josh's room cleaned out and I got the general clutter picked up in the house. Today, I got the laundry caught up and got the living room vaccumed and dusted, so I'm starting to feel like things are coming together again, finally.

We got our seatwork started at around 12:30. Our Bible lesson was on John the Baptist and we had a really nice discussion about "fruit." I think I helped the kids grasp the concept of the kind of fruit we should be displaying and how we are known by our fruits by discussing different types of fruit trees. We talked about how we recognize different fruit trees by their fruit.

We played sight word bingo, which Josh won again, while Brianna did her grammar. Then, she went off to her room to work on a math test while I helped Josh and Megan with their math. Once that was done, the kids went out to play and "help" Dad while I got lunch ready.

After lunch, we read some from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before Josh and Megan went outside to play some more. Brianna and I continued our revolutionay war book and we read some from a "Childhood of Famous Americans" book about Paul Revere. We're supposed to be doing a presentation about him for our homeschool group's Biography Fair in a couple of weeks.

After Brianna and I straightened up a bit, we watched a movie based on one of the "Dear America" books, called "Winter of the Red Snow." It was good. One thing that I am really amazed about is how "immersed" I feel in our topic, the Revolutionary War. This is the first time I've gone into a unit study (and, as we lean more toward a very relaxed schooling style, it has become much less a unit study and much more just learning about a topic of interest) without a schedule. We have spent MUCH more time on this topic than I ever would have dreamed and we haven't done hardly any activities, but I feel like we've gotten a feel for the lives of the people and the atmosphere of the time period like we never have before. I'm not sure if it's the amount of time we've spent on it or the fact that most of our learning has come from reading good historical fiction. I lean strongly toward the historical fiction. We never would have read as many books during a regular unit because I never would have had enough activities to last us this long and we wouldn't have had the time to spend reading each day. However, I feel like I've learned more (yes, me -- I certainly hope Brianna has, too) during this unit than ever before. And there is still so much to cover -- so many battles. I'm not sure how to cover that. I hope I do justice to the whole time period and not the just the highlights.