I know I said I would try to do these wrap up posts weekly, and I haven’t posted one since June. Oops! Life happened and summer got busy. I will try to do these posts more frequently, but for now, here is our homeschool summer wrap up.

The County Fair

The boys started 4H last year, and they both got to participate in our county fair. The County Fair was strange, to say the least. Organizers attempted to have an in person fair, but nobody was allowed to attend, including the exhibitors. Here are the events the boys entered and their results.

Carter

Cake Decorating – Reserve Champion

Archery Display – Champion

Robotics Competition – First Place

Archery Competition – First Place in his category

Started the New School Year

Our seventh year of homeschooling is full of new things. Carter is now in seventh grade and Peyton is in fifth. New for us this year is doing a boxed curriculum with two Sonlight levels. I will admit, I was completely overwhelmed before we started and was regretting my choice to do two levels, but I am pleasantly surprised. Doing two Sonlight levels is much easier than I expected. Carter does most of his work independently. I only do the read alouds for his core. I’m more involved with level D for Peyton, mainly because he wants me to work with him one on one. This is working really well. When everyone stays on task and completes their independent work in a timely manner, we finish by lunch time. I was even considering ordering the lap book kit for Peyton, but Sonlight is crazy busy with orders right now so shipping is taking awhile. Instead, I’m downloading some supplemental activities from My Teaching Library to give him a bit more hands on work, instead of just the reading that Sonlight is known for.

Adventure Schooling

We took a break from our books and headed to Yellowstone National Park for a few days of adventure schooling. I won’t write too much about it since you can read about our trip in that post. I do have a fun story though that I didn’t include in my other post.

Before setting out on our adventure, Josh stopped by our local sporting goods store and picked up some bear spray and an air horn since these are good things to have when trekking around Yellowstone. One day when we were setting off on another day of adventure, Josh stopped by one of the little stores and bought donuts for a treat (he was just supposed to be grabbing coffee for us). The donuts were sitting between us in the front console, and the boys were in the back seat with our cooler sitting between them. Josh’s backpack was also back there, which contained the air horn and the bear spray.

We were travelling along enjoying the scenery, when Carter decided to have another donut. He had to kind of stretch and reach for it as he was limited by the confines of his seatbelt. Quite suddenly, our serenity was disturbed by the ear piercing scream of the air horn. We were all shaken and trying to figure out what just happened. I looked in the backseat to the crying children, Josh couldn’t hear me saying “it was the air horn,” since his ears were ringing, and Peyton was ready to fight whatever was making that noise. I couldn’t help but laugh hysterically at our predicament. Once things calmed down, we figure out that Carter had pushed the cooler just enough that it leaned on the button of the air horn. All because he just wanted a donut. When all was said and done, we were just happy it wasn’t the bear spray.

Other Projects

My first video review is now on my YouTube Channel! This one is for History of Classical Music from Beautiful Feet and you can find the written review here. I have two more videos that need to be edited and added to my channel. Both of those will show you the Sonlight Curriculum we are using. My channel is a work in progress, but I will get more videos posted soon.

That’s our Homeschool Summer Wrap Up. I will work on doing these more frequently since we are back into our normal school routine. I hope you all had a great summer and a great start to your school year!