New School Year Just Around the Corner!!!

We managed to finish up our school year a little early this year, so we've enjoyed a nice break of about 3 weeks. We've never had a break that long before at any time of year! Now we are ready to start our new school year on Monday. Hooray! I'm just a bit excited about it myself. Hopefully, my enthusiasm will rub off on the kids, too.

Haylee tried out some of her first-day workboxes this week. She did 6 of the 12. She said she really enjoyed everything, so hopefully that's a good sign for the rest of the year! Holden tried out a little of his first-day workboxes, too, and that went pretty well. Hayden hasn't started his yet, but he and I were busy catching up on 20 weeks' worth of music lessons! We abandoned playing the recorder back around Christmas time when we all became terribly ill. Following that, one or the other of us seemed to be sick with something or other for months on end! I didn't want us spreading germs in our instruments, so we just abandoned our lessons and never got back to them. But we both love playing the recorder, so we got 60 songs done in 2 days this week! Now we're on track to start our new lesson book on Monday. It's Beyond the 9-Note Recorder Method for Alto. This will be our 4th year playing the recorder, and it's really been fun. We did the first two years on Soprano, and the 2nd two years on Alto. Next, we'd like to move on to Bass Recorder, but it's a little cost prohibitive at $100-$300 per bass recorder. We especially enjoy doing duets, so we may just move on to a book of duets for both soprano and alto combined.

I have a 7th grader, a 2nd grader, and a PKer this year, so it ought to be an interesting year! I'm looking forward to getting everybody back into a routine of being busy with schoolwork every day, as the extended time off has become a little chaotic for my liking!