Prince of Peace Academy, Week 1

The name of our home school is Prince of Peace Academy. We chose it because we really wrestled with educational choices for our children, and once we finally felt sure that God wanted us to home school, we felt such a deep, restful peace.

To start the week we went to the museum. This was our third year celebrating "not back to school day" with a couple other families, and it's always such a fun way to start the school year. The kids played in the children's museum while the mommies visited (and chased toddlers) and then we headed outdoors for a picnic. We had a nice lunch that unfortunately ended with two of the kids having ant bites. Poor Canaan actually got over 20 ant bites. Those things were MEAN. They swelled up right away but he didn't seem too upset about it. By evening they were all calmed down and just little red dots remained. He woke in the night crying, "MAMA! MAMAAA!" and he sounded scared, so of course I ran in and got him. He nursed and went back to sleep, and didn't wake up until about 8:30 which is way late for him. When I got him out of my bed I had QUITE a shock. The bites were VERY swollen, as was the skin all around them. I called the doctor and they said to bring him in. It turns out the poor baby is allergic to ants! No wonder they swelled so badly! We gave him Benadryl all week and put hydrocortizone on the bumps and today, four days later, they are settled down to the point that they look like normal ant bites. Still bumps, still hard, but not scary, crazy big.

So we do school in a chronological fashion, moving through history starting in ancient times right on up through modern times. Having spent four years in this cycle, we are now back at the beginning, in ancients. We studied archaeology this week, which was very interesting. The boys especially liked all the creepy skeletons and body casts (pictures in books, not real ones). For science we looked at lots of cool books and websites about sea creatures - mostly deep sea creatures. Friday is project day and so far today we learned how to draw a frog and we listened to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and colored pictures about his life. Later we'll do a history and a science project.

My most enthusiastic book-learner this week was Caris. She absolutely loves workbooks and blasts through them at record speed.

So there's a little summary of our week! I'm going to try to do this every week just as a little record of what our weeks are like.