Sunday, March 9, 2008

Busy Week - TOG Unit Celebration & Basketball

Sorry for the lapse in posts. Things have been very busy around here.

Tuesday night was our monthly homeschool support group meeting. Mari Fitz-Wynn, a Raleigh homeschool mom who hosts a short weekly homeschool radio program and is also the legislative liason for our state homeschool association, was our guest speaker. She talked about our children as works of art, sometimes messy, but uniquely created by God to be special and to delight HIM!

Thursday night was our TOG Unit 3 Celebration. The 13 families in our TOG Co-op all met at the church to share what the kids had learned over the last 9 weeks, as we studied King Solomon and the Divided Kingdom, the Assyrians, the New Babylonians, the Medes & Persians, and finally the Ancient Greeks up to the time of Alexander the Great. Each family brought a dessert or finger food, mostly of the Greek variety - grapes, olives, cheese, spanakopita, baklava, hummus & pita bread, and a few other delectables. The younger children displayed the many craft projects they had made, and got up to talk about something they had learned. The parents got to test their knowledge of ancient history by playing Jeopardy, which the Upper Grammar and Dialectic 2 classes play every week to review what they've learned from their reading.


Then the Dialectic 2 class ( 8th & 9th graders ), which I co-lead, performed a telling of the Odyssey, the tale of the Greek hero, Odysseus, and his adventure-filled journey home to Ithaka after the Trojan War. We performed it with scripts, since our rehearsal time had been pretty limited, but the kids had a blast preparing costumes and props and performing for their families, and it was a great experience for them.

Friday morning that same co-op class met to give their assigned presentations on Ancient Greece, and then we went out to a local Greek restaurant for lunch. These brave young people looked over the menu, which included such Greek specialties as Tabouli, Hummus, Felafel, and Hebe, and proceeded to order cheeseburgers and chicken gyros ( well, at least that was somewhat ethnic ). Tracy, my co-teacher, and I ordered sampler platters, and at least coaxed a few of the kids to taste baba ghanouj, hummus, tabouli, and baklava. It was pretty amusing. ;-)


Friday night was our annual Lighthouse Basketball Parent / Player Games. All six teams come out with their parents, siblings, relatives, and some alumni, and the kids play against the adults. For each team, there is a 10 minute running clock, subs run on and off the floor freely ( more frequently for the adults, usually!), one of the dads is the ref, and everyone always has a great time. After 10 minutes, the next team takes the floor, and things just keep going until we kick everyone out of the gym after 2 1/2 hours! A number of families met up at Cici's Pizza afterwards, to continue the fellowship!

I didn't play basketball ( I leave that to the younger, more nimble moms!) but cheered from the stands, and left early to go pick up Sarah, who got a ride back to Raleigh from a college friend, and is home this week for Spring Break! Well, she was home for the night anyway, but left yesterday ( with one of our cars!) to go visit friends at UNC-Wilmington for 2 days. I do believe she'll be hanging out here the rest of the week! :-)

Yesterday, Jason had a soccer game in the morning and a basketball game in the afternoon. In the morning, I co-moderated a Transcript Workshop for homeschool moms, where we watched Part III & IV of Inge Cannon's "Transcript Boot Camp" DVD seminar. We had done Part I & II back in December. My friend Tammy and I brought samples of high school transcripts and answered questions, but the DVD does a really thorough job of explaining what to include on a transcript and how to best present our students to college admissions officers. It is available from
http://www.edplus.com/.

Today we went to church and then came home and CLEANED the house!! It really needed a whole-family attack, and things look much better now. I am hosting 15 ladies here tomorrow night for a Tapestry Tea, which is an introduction to the Tapestry of Grace curriculum.

Lastly, we got some MUCH needed rain this week. Two good storm systems came through, Tuesday and Friday, and dropped about 3-4 inches of rain here in the Triangle. There are still severe water restrictions in place in most municipalities in this area, but hopefully the rain will continue to fall and refill those streams and reservoirs.

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2 comments:

GrammaJelly said...

I'm all out of breath just thinking of this schedule of events...wow! So much packed into so little time. Congratulations on the Greek restaurant foray...brave kids!

Faye Creech said...

Wheww!! I need a nap after just reading about that week!! We are now beginning to mend (hopefully) and after a very busy week last week, too, if we had to be sick this was a good week to do it! SOrry I missed the meeting last week but it was D&E's birthday. Talk to you soon - enjoy S being home! How is A doing so far away from home?
-F