You saw my lovely TOG folders, right? All perfectly organized according to week numbers and children. I had some pretty, pretty plans. And now we’ve shelved them all until after Christmas.
Yikes.
It started with Abbie. She was getting frustrated with school work in general and needed to get outside the box. We ended up getting a little radical. Everything, except for math, is shelved until after Christmas. Instead, she’s spending her time working on a sociology project – looking at how society’s expectations of teens have changed over the decades and analyzing what kind of an impact that shift in expectation has had on teen behavior. Whew. Better her than me.
It was her idea – I thought she should study a pivotal point in history or do some kind of crazy science project. But, no, she’s doing what she’s doing. She will turn her paper into a website during the last week of her project, so that she can help bring her message to other teens. I had no idea I was raising a radical.
Having Abbie on a break from TOG meant that either I would continue on with the boys and we’d all end up out of sync or I could also take a break with the boys. We chose a break. Right now we’re knee deep in a study of our back yard. That’s right – there’s no need to go far from home. We’re looking at our yard as a habitat and studying the animals and plants within it. Yesterday we learned about food chains, the day before we wrote haikus and acrostic poems, the day before that we painted pictures of some of the birds in our yard. We’re putting it all together in a scrapbook at the end.
The boys are excited. We’ve printed out tons of pictures that we’ve taken over the past couple of years of animals and birds that live in our yard. We’re making mini-books and neat folding things that we can stick into our scrapbook. And I’m excited, too. We’re covering grade 2, 3, and 4 life science all in one project! I usually avoid science, but we’re really embracing it now in a very fun unit study.
And since I like to plan, here’s what I have planned for our “project” weeks:
1 - Habitat unit study
2 – Habitat unit study
3 – Light and sound experiments, maybe a small lapbook
4 – Astronomy
5 – Christmas crafts, songs, cooking, stories, home made presents
6 – more Christmas 
I’m really looking forward to having more time to concentrate on Christmas. The boys will be playing some Christmas songs with their friends at a couple of retirement homes in town, we’re going to put a big focus on home made gifts this year, and we’re going to have the time and space to put Christ first through all that we do.
And it’s really neat to see Abbie so excited about her work. All of this has made it easier for me to put my plans aside and be a little spontaneous.
