For all you wonderful friends who check back in from time to time and wondered if perhaps I lost my battle with cancer, no I'm here, alive and kicking.  It did take over my life for a while as you can imagine.  But we are now back home in China, although in a new city and are happily getting back to life as "normal".

But that is not the topic of this entry.  Anyone who has read this blog before knows how UNtextbooky I tend to be in my approach.  I'm not ANTI textbook, we still use them on occasion, but as I may have said before "the book is my servant not my master".  But I DID kind of go text booky as we got started this year.  The reason was all the transition we were in.  Last  year (during my chemo and radiation) I didn't homeschool at all.  My very good friend runs a small one room school house and the kids went there.  As we prepared to move back to China we were on the road a lot and weren't able to do the projects and studes and so on that we normally do.  To be very honest, it was just easier to hand a book to ds (13yo) and say "please do this page". 

I was kind of concerned about the shape of things, I wasn't sure if this was good? bad? What?  Well, now that we are settled in and finding our routine I can see I needn't have worried.  We just can't get very far in any book without getting sidetracked by something interesting.  We brought a science and history text book back with us (at ds's insistence) and he has been reading one or both of them almost everyday and doing the questions at the end of the chapter.  The writing was at MY insistence because we are concentrating on good writing this year.  Well, first we hit a section in the science book about the different systems of the body, PAUSE......now we are designing a lapbook around that topic.  Lots of fun.  THEN he found a section in the history book that mentioned some of the Caesars PAUSE.....up goes a homemade wall chart to write a timeline of the different rulers of Rome and the time they lived.  There's also talk of a salt dough map of Rome during the time period of his choice (as yet to be determined) more fun.

So much for getting a certain chapter done or a certain book finished by this tme or that.  There are just too many way cool things to discover and make and do.  I guess this goes back to the book being the servant.  Here it has served as a springboard to launch us into something all its own rather than corral us and keep us from the adventure of true learning..

So don't be afraid, go ahead.....get sidetracked!

doulos