School Starts!

(This table needs a few more students around it, don't you think?)

We started second grade on Friday! I had spent the last few weeks getting it all organized. Usually I get two 3" binder notebooks, then I make 34 index tabs, one for each week of the school year and label them "Week 1, Lesson 1-5" etc. Then I take all the work text books and rip them out of their binders, hole punch them and put them in stacks. I then collate all the lesson 1's, 2's, 3's 4's & 5's and put them in the first week tab etc. all the way to week 34. That way when I'm ready to do each week, I pull that week out, put it in a small 1" binder (since the 3" binder is now full of the first half of the years work, Lesson 1-17, and a little bulky to haul around) and though it took me a few days to organize...it's done. I don't have to hunt for papers all year. Schuyler made me promise she could work out of at least one book so I left her grammar/language books in tacked, though I am still trying to convince her to put those in as well. Anyway, they were done and sitting there and Schuyler asks "Can we can start school?" I figure "sure" since I know we'll get behind closer to adoption, travel, adjustment time anyway. So maybe now we can still finish by June and not have to go all summer.
I am so impressed with how well she is doing. She hated to read and was slow. It was as if during the summer break somehow she improved! She is spelling words I didn't think she knew and reading words I thought would be to hard and sounding them out with ease. Thank goodness kids learn in spite of us! I switched our curriculum this year and it is more activity than drill. We are having so much fun with it. I also decided to set up a schedule rather than work on a subject till she completed it. Some days she was working till 4PM having started at 9AM. But now we start at 9AM do about 20 min per subject and what she doesn't get done she does on her own in the afternoon and she is learning real fast to get it done in her allotted time! So now we get done by 11:15 or noon depending on the day. Mon & Wed we have Heritage studies and Dan has agreed to do Science on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he comes home. So T,Th & Fri we get done by 11:15 unless we do an art project too.
We will go to family camp again August 20-24th, so we will take that week off. I had started the 2nd week in August last year too as with my mothers terminal cancer thought we would be going to Florida sometime during the year. It turned out we bought our new house in November and school was put on halt till after Christmas break. So we ended up being about 2 weeks behind.
As for my mother...what a trooper! Even though her doctors gave her 18-24 months to live with treatment over 3 years ago she continues to defy the odds. Last summer after several months with no signs of cancer following intense chemo/radiation, it appeared again. She has sustained (I think) three separate rounds of chemo since and the last MRI a few weeks ago showed the tumor in her lung had reduced by 30%. So she is doing another round of 3 weeks of chemo (once a week), one week off, then 3 more weeks with another MRI to follow. She is tired all the time and had to get two shots last week due to low white blood count and those tend to make her bones hurt and give flu like symptoms, but she will be 80 in December and has proved to be a tough old Cajun broad!!! YOU GO GIRL!!!