The puppies went in the nickles worth this week, they are very adorable and the kids want to keep one but 2 dogs are enough for me!  We are also babysitting a tank full of salt water fish for a couple that are moving.  They are very fun to watch. 

Emily is basically done with school, we are just working through math corrections which she has fun doing on the white board.  The kids love the white board.  Isaac does his spelling words on it.  For some reason doing the work on the board makes it fun.   Now she is working on her project book for Cake Decorating in 4-H. She has to give a demonstration this week.  The cake auction went well and she earned 40.00$

Isaac took all day to do 2 worksheets of subtraction with borrowing but that was because I wasn't right there with him bringing him back to reality every now and then.  We read the story of Daniel Boone today and he loved it.  He has a mock coon skin hat.  He loves playing outdoors.

Mandy and I took the horses up to our neighbors pasture.  They love it!  Plenty of grass and water and room to roam! She has quite a bit of her math left because it took me a while to find a curriculum I thought would work for her.  We use Teaching Textbooks and it is working very well.  It's all done with a dvd that teaches the math and comes with a solutions dvd if they get stuck.  Very straighforward and easy to understand.  This is Mandy's 2nd year in Algregra, I want her to take math every year of highschool, I might use a consumer math as one year.  She is taking Economics this year too.  She doesn't really like it.  The book we are using is always having her look things up on the internet.  It's a good way to learn but time consuming.  Especially if you don't have a good computor.

She loves to write and composed a modern day fairy tale of Cinderella putting a spiriual twist to it.  I thought it was cute.  I'll have her put it in the next Encourager Newsletter they do.

She spends hours with her music.  She will do  a voice reicital this weekend and also accompany another voice student on the piano.  She also gets to sing a duet with her dad which is special.  Her solo song is Completely and is very beautiful.  I have her taking a credit of music this year as she is very involved.  Along with practicing for piano lessons she plays songs by ear that she hears on the radio or cds.  She is involved in a youth choir at church and sings harmony with her family for church specials.  She takes voice lessons in exchange for cleaning the teachers house.  To get an "A" in her class she also must keep a journel of things learned or write an essay of what she learned and research a composer and do a report and write up 5 music appreciation sheets.

For each class she takes I decided ahead of time what she needs to accomplish to get her "A" or "B".  Nothing less is acceptable in my homeschool!  There is no reason not to excell!

I have to get up eary and I'm staying up late to do this blog so I better quit!