Here I am at the end of another school week. My Thursday night checklist is posted on the corkboard by my desk. For some reason, there is a cookbook, sippy cup, bottle of vitamins, and half a carrot next to my laptop. The kids are just settling in to sleep. Noah is nursing, so I have assumed my usual typing position: left hand on the desk with my left arm acting as a sling for his head, and my right arm doing the super peck on the keyboard.

I have scheduled the resources list for next week’s Torah portion and updated Torah school. Now, in this quiet, I need to ponder the homeschool week we have just finished.

• I am loving all the notebooking that we have been doing lately. It is way more fun when the kids can actually write. Naomi actually has to write two sentences by herself, and then I help her correct it. Holly and Isaac tell me what to write and then they copy it.
• Sadie is doing so well in her work. She has a binder that she is filling with alphabet notebooking pages. She loves the picture studies that we have been doing. She’s not too thrilled about the poetry. I can’t really blame her, since I’m not real big into poetry either. There are a few good poems out there, but I haven’t written any of them lol. Prose is definitely my thing.
• I had to reorganize my desk to make room so we can fire up the woodstove. Now I feel a bit cramped. Perhaps someday I will have a real desk to do all my work at. In the meantime, I am glad I hung up our children’s ketubbahs, and the handstitched mini quilt of a turtle my mom made for me.
• I have been practicing the principle that B does not happen until A is complete, ie lunch is not served until schoolwork is done.
• Wow! Our bodies are incredible things! We’re having a great time studying the human body. I’m so glad I switched subjects at Isaac’s request. They are actually looking at some of our human body books in their own time!
• I used an entire supersize ink cartridge in two days!
• We are making leaps and bounds in reading. Naomi has been working on the computer with Skillado, and all three of them are using phonics workbooks from Burt Books. Now you know where all the ink went. Finally, Holly and Isaac are looking at the word and saying it, instead of painfully sounding it out. I definitely want to go back and get the last three in the set.
• It’s so great when I read something in history and they remember it from another study! I said, “Alexander,” and Naomi finishes with, “The Great!” They remembered all about Bucephalus his horse who was afraid of his own shadow. Love that story!
• We drew pictures of the different types of Greek columns, you know, doric, ionic, and corinthian. It’s not terribly important information, but I remember drawing them when I was in high school. I even got out my timeline notebook and showed the kids my drawings. Very cool!
• We also have learned about four of the wonders of the ancient world, the pyramids, hanging gardens, statue of Zues, and the lighthouse at Alexandria. We think it’s very interesting that many were destroyed by things like earthquakes. Hmmm, perhaps they were trying to build their own towers of Babel.
• Elisha is our official town crier, or so he thinks. He has taken it upon himself to make reading outloud an absolute misery. But the story must go on, so I continue.
• I’m very thankful for the folding banquet table we had invested in a while ago. It gets popped up after breakfast to be used during school, and then we fold it away at lunch. It goes right near my desk so I can keep things going smoothly.
• Naomi goes through the house counting to ten in hebrew. Yes, I can do it, too. Here goes: echad, shtayim, shalosh, arba, chomesh, shish, sheva, shmoneh, taysha, eser!

Well, I think we had a full week. I still have enough time to make a coffee cake before I go to bed. I have been baking every day to build up a stash for Shabbat. So far I have:

• 3 doz ginger snaps
• 4 doz chocolate chip cookies, minus two because they wouldn’t fit in the bag, so I had to eat them
• carob date fudge
• 3 loaves bread

I plan to make the coffee cake for our breakfast on Shabbat.

I hope you also had a wonderful week, and may you have a restful Shabbat!