Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with all the cell division

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Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy Friday, y’all! I hope you’ve had a great week! It’s been a good one here. We’re finally settling into a good school routine now that most everyone else has gone back to school.

Monday began with a downpour. I felt so bad for all the kids heading back to public and private school. I remember always being excited about the first day of school and seeing my friends again. I can only imagine that my enthusiasm would have been dampened by getting my carefully selected first-day-of-school outfit soaked.

I would comment on how thankful I was that we didn’t have to get out – but we did. I took Josh to breakfast since I knew the rest of our week was going to be busy. Brianna wasn’t too excited about having to drive to school in the rain, but she went anyway.

My sister called during lunch, asking me to come get her and the baby because she had a flat tire. Just as I was heading out the door to get her, Brianna called saying she’d locked her keys in her car. I was putting out fires all over the place, y’all.

We also added health into our schedule on Monday. We’re using Nutrition 101, which I received free to review several years ago. I really loved it, but it didn’t fit well into our schedule at the time – probably because Josh and Megan were younger with much shorter attention spans. That seems like a logical assumption since I remembered the chapters being rather long, but, when we read it Monday, they were much shorter than I remembered. That’s a good thing because it fit nicely into our morning work schedule.

We’ve also added CNN Student News to our morning schedule. Love it! The kids really enjoy it, too. It’s just long enough – 10 minutes – to get caught up on what’s going on in the world without being too long. I really like the mix of current news stories with lifestyle pieces. It’s already become something we look forward to each morning.

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Tuesday, we did something we haven’t done in a long time – probably since the last time we used Nutrition 101. We made brain hats. The huge difference between this time and last time was that the kids took their time with them (they worked on them during read aloud time) and they were able to assemble the hats themselves. Having older kids rocks!

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Wednesday, I had to go in for my annual health risk assessment screening. The last two years, I really looked forward to the screening because I was the healthiest I had been in decades. This year, not so much. Seeing how much weight I’ve regained right there in black and white was sobering.

It was what I needed, though. My wake-up call since I’ve been lazily living in denial. I’m 40 pounds over where I want to be and it stops now. Actually, it stopped Wednesday. I immediately came home and started making changes – getting back to eating the way I know I should and not, as Jillian Michaels would say, phoning in my workout and calling it good.

As a matter of fact, Thursday, my running buddy was late enough that she texted me to start without her. I’d already done the half-mile-or-so loop that includes a hill that used to not seem so bad, but lately I’ve hated. I saw my friend coming up the path heading to the hill and met her, falling into step beside her. She asked if I was going to do the hill again. I said, “I weighed yesterday. Yeah, I’ll do the hill again. Let’s go!”

I’m going to get back to sharing my weight-loss progress here. That was very helpful to me, so be looking for my updates on Wednesdays – unless that doesn’t interest you at in, in which case you can just skip my Wednesday posts. I need the accountability, though.

In other news, three times this week I’ve happened by Charlotte’s web (See what I did there?) as she’s caught a creature in it. Twice I have actually gotten to observe her wrapping it up. Very cool! Of course, she scoots back to the center of her web as soon as she spots me, so I haven’t had any luck getting a photo or video.

I did get this one yesterday:

Charlotte and the butterfly

I feel a bit sorry for the butterfly, but I can’t deny that it’s fascinating to watch this spider.

This week in biology we’ve been studying mitosis. I have found this YouTube channel that has been very helpful, Crash Course. We’ve only watched the biology ones (and only 2 or 3 of them, so far), so I can’t recommend all of the courses, but the biology ones have been great for reinforcing what the kids are learning.

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I will say that there is some off-color humor that some parents might not appreciate, such as the joke: What do teenage boys and RNA have in common? They want to unzip your genes.

There was some passing comment about alcohol/being drunk on the one we watched this week, but I can’t remember what it was. Still, the educational value has outweighed the kind of off-color humor in those random, infrequent comments. I just wanted to point that out because you may want to preview the videos if you consider using them in your homeschool.

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In addition to watching the videos, we also make a cell life cycle/mitosis poster that turned out pretty well and I think it did a good job of helping cement those concepts. We also looked at the stages of mitosis through the microscope in an onion tip slide. (Which reminded me of Twilight, just for the record.

That’s it for me. Enjoy your weekend!

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Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.

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10 Comments

  1. Looks like a wonderful week! Getting back into routine is such a stress reliever for me 😉 I say it’s my son that thrives on routine, but it’s really me mostly lol! Oh and Charlotte is lovely but also giving me the heebie jeebies! 🙂 LOL

  2. I’ll look forward to your weight loss posts. It is helpful to have the accountability and I really hope you do well in your goals. (Running up a hill twice is a very good start!) I’m still walking an hour each day and have started playing badminton with Gary (which frankly burns more calories laughing than actually exercising). I so want to start running but it has been two decades and I’m genuinely concerned I might pass out…
    I’m over in England cheering you on.

  3. We’ve had lots of rain here this week as well. Thankfully, I didn’t end up out in it quite as much as you did.

    I’m so glad you’re going to start posting about weightloss journey again. I’ve been wanting to ask how it was going, but thought it might be rude. I’ve been on target for an entire week now…go me!

    Looking forward to following your continuing journey!

  4. I see we use the same science programme. We found the initial units especially cells, but also genetics, tough going. Didn’t think of the Crash Course series when looking for supplementary material. Might go there for a little review later. Thankfully we’ve foudn the later units much smoother sailing.

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