Back to school... again!

It seems only yesterday we went back to school after our summer holidays, and yet, here I am posting about going back to school again - this time after our Easter break!

We all enjoyed our holidays this time. Little travel involved - just kicking back at home. Interestingly, the kids found it hard to not do school work! Each of them had days where they'd drag their books out to do some English or Maths work.

So here we are back into school work. This week has been a busy one with animals, so school work has seemed to take a back seat, but I think we have done more already than we would have done most other weeks!

Our animal dramas have included an exciting perpetual head abscess for one horse, a lameness issue with a dragging back leg for another horse, which was fixed just as mysteriously as it occurred, and pink eye treatment for Wayne, the drover's, poddy calves. The poddy calves have been the most fun. Not fun in terms of pink eye, fun in terms of all of us being involved and wrestling to get them to take the cod liver oil.

Here are the directions for chaos... take five calves of varying sizes, add one teenage boy with a lasoo, add one girl with a video camera, two small children who are excellent commentators, a mother armed with the syringe filled with goop and let it all happen. It was a circus. If I could find the downloading cable for the video camera I'd show you.

As for school work, we have done lots of English and Maths this week. Hannah is becoming a little more independent with her English, which is nice for me. Isobel and Zach have discovered that they are both close to the end of last year's maths work, which is not bad considering they only started last year's work at the end of last October. I expect that it will all be done by the beginning of June. then we can start the this year's work!

Art class and piano lessons have been a go this week. Issie is loving piano! She's making excellent progress and we're seeing acorresponding improvement in her maths and the concepts surrounding it. Interesting...

Zach has guitar lessons that Saturday. He has not been practicing and will hopefully get a shellacking from his teacher.

Drama class seems to have fallen away. It's hard to get pieces that are appropriate for the variety of ages who attend and the kids have lost interest in doing adult pieces. It's a shame but that's the way of things in a small country town sometimes - despite your best efforts and the wild enthusiasm of a few, things just fizzle.

Issie leaves for the US in three weeks, so I am a bit puzzled with how to tackle the big kids' shared English tasks. I can't really send Issie with her work since part of the unit is a collaborative task to be done with Zach. Add to that that she'll be pretty busy over there anyway and it's unlikely she'll have a lot of extra time on some days. If I wait until Issie gets back, we are at the 14th of June - almost the end of term 2. Perhaps I'll sit on the Twlight unit for now and continue with grammar, creative writing and vocabulary work for this term, then next term we'll start Twilight and Romeo and Juliet in earnest. I doubt that you can ever have too much vocabulary, grammar or creativity in your writing.

Going to check on wounded horses... and get myself ready for the onslaught of my dear friend Bec's smallest boy, Sam, who's coming to visit this afternoon. I expect we'll be busy while he's here!