Has it really been over 2 weeks?

And, I know that the answer is yes!
I have a lot of excuses, but most of them are lame!
We have been very busy...but that really isn't a very good excuse either.
So I will update you on the school front.
I had a friend pick up a Student kit for Olivia's math, as we were using a friend's from a couple of years ago, and that was working quite well, with just photocopying the pages her son hadn't completed. Well, we finally got to the point where he had done every page of every lesson, so I roughly calculated how long it would take me to make my own worksheets for the remaining 18 lessons, and decided it was much more economical to just go ahead and buy a whole student book for Olivia to work on of her own. So a friend picked it up for us at the homeschooler's convention in Saskatoon, and that saved me the $5 in shipping and the week's wait!
She began the tests yesterday - completing 6 of them. I marked them today and only found 2 wrong answers - both simple errors - not actually multiplication errors, but where one question was supposed to be 6x5 she wrote it as 6x4 and got the right answer of 24, but of course she had the question wrong....but anyway, 2 corrections out of all 6 tests is pretty darn good.
I never did get to marking her Language Arts today...but she always does well in LA, and still says it is her favorite subject, so I don't worry about it too much. She has been concentrating on trying to fill up a reading chart I have her about 10 days ago, so she only has 2 or 3 more spots to fill and then she will be done.
Grace has been working in some little workbooks that I bought her for last year, but we never actually got to. She is working in both the number one, and the beginning letter one. Which is good. I finally made the math poster I have needed to make for the past many weeks, so she can finally move on in her Math-u-See book next week too.
I have been feeling lately like I really would like the kids to do more history. And KONOS has a lot of history in the units, but I still am having a really tough time planning and executing a complete KONOS unit. I try, but I have a tendency to plan too much to finish, or like this present one, put off something I want to do to the point of not getting anything in the unit done.
So I have been once again picking the brains of friends, and am considering using a program for next year called Learning Adventure. It is a history based unit study program - geared for kids in grades 4-8, although Grace would listen to all the read alouds with us - so she would get the history, she just wouldn't do the language arts.
It covers Bible/Character Training, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and Fine Arts.
A WORLD OF ADVENTURE (Book 1) - covers Ancient Egypt through the Age of Exploration (approx. 2300 B.C. to A.D. 1600).
It is a 180 day program (which is a typical school year). The only subject it doesn't cover is Math, so we would continue with the math program that we are using now.
So the reasons I like it is that it tells me EXACTLY what to do for the 180 days. I like that...no way I can plan too much, or not plan enough. It uses 'living books' which basically means novels, or biographies rather than a textbook format. I like that because I think it is easier to remember things if there is something personal you can attach to the event. For example, a textbook may sum up the Boston Tea Party in 4 sentences, but if you have read a novel about a person who was involved in the event, it would talk about what led up to it, and also what happened as a result of it. I think you would retain more about it by reading a STORY about it. It covers every subject, so I don't have to piece together 5 different books, and that is how I like things to work. Unit studies are easier for me that way.
What I don't like is that it is 180 days, and so we would have to be sure to be diligent otherwise we could easily fall behind. So anyway, I am telling you all of this so that you can pray for us. I have asked Greg what he thinks, and he agrees with my likes, and my dislikes of it so pray as we work at deciding.
Okay, I have to go to bed...you see what happens, I take so long to update you that I have too much to say when I finally post!
I will try and make it not 2 weeks from now that I post again!
C