Lesson learned: Get kids to help

Truism relearned: When spinning wheels, enlist children's help.

I stalled out on getting visual aids ready for the new year, so I launched into it this morning---unprepared (but knowing that so not overly ambitious.) We assigned out parts of key Americans, and J-Dawg started working on his costume. He will launch the new year with a presentation. It's a military captain from the Book of Mormon teaching about liberty. That's the overriding theme for the year. S-man will launch the second unit with a reenactment of George Washington, and then my daughter gets the third segment with Abigail Adams.

For the exercise portion of the morning, I picked up a couple of American Education Publishing workbooks for my sons. It's a lower grade than the rest of their work, but I specifically got it for the English Grammar. It is nice to just pull a page out of a book every morning for them to work. (Actually about 5 pages: one from each section.) I'm also tearing the pages out they have to do that day. Always before, I've handed them the book, but that seems to be discouraging them. We'll keep the completed worksheets in a section of their Almanacks this year. (We're doing Almanacks after the order of Poor Richard's Almanacks.)

We also went grocery shopping and picked up most of the needed groceries. Prices are up. I got 3 cartons of powdered milk for $15-something apiece. I used to get them at Aldi's for $9.

Then we dropped off a bunch of educational teacher's guides, texts, teaching aids, etc. at the local homeschool lending library. Hello, tax write offs!!! On to Goodwill for another delivery. We cleaned my daughter's room last night. I'd had it with clutter in there! Between the 2 stops, the donations are in the neighborhood of $900. I've been cleaning out shelves of about 5 years of homeschooling materials. (Hopefully, it will help some other homeschoolers.) I know I have appreciated everything others have given me!

Speaking of clutter, I polished my kitchen yesterday. I was given a plant for Mother's Day that had gnats, and I've fought them ever since. I read that I need to pour ammonia down the sink so I'm off to buy ammonia.

P.S. My daughter is thrilled that she is almost completely done with second grade. I tossed her an extra, thick workbook at the beginning of May, and she is almost done with it. She's a motivated girl.