Thinking outloud

I am starting to feel that weary, tired of homeschooling, sick of our routine feeling that I get every single year during the winter. Some years I have just made life miserable for everyone in the house and battled on, sticking to the rigid plan that I wrote in the lazy days of the summer. Some years, I have scrapped all the schoolwork, and just taken a breather. I am not sure what to do this year, but I think somehow the answer is coming to me and, if I just spend some quiet time thinking about it, I will know what we should do.

Projects
We are doing Operation Christmas Shoebox with a few local homeschool families, which will give us a chance to shop for some items to send to some children who have much less than we do.
We are working with our local 4H chapter to collect food and blankets for the hungry/cold during the winter.
We are wrapping gifts at the local bookstore with our 4H group.
We have adopted two soldiers in Iraq, and are writing to them and sending them packages until they come home.
We are working with our Civil Air Patrol squadron on providing a large number of packages to servicemen/women in Iraq by collecting items and putting together the packages.
Josh is marching in at least one, and maybe two parades, with his Color Guard unit.
Max is continuing guitar lessons.
We are working on our long term solution to our OM problem, and our spontaneous problem practice.
We are baking and sewing a variety of items to give to family and friends for Christmas/Hanukkah.

Sooo.... I am sitting here thinking today about how to fit all of these wonderful things into our lives. The boys have chosen all of these projects, and are really excited about most of them. Then I realized what I needed to do.

We will do Math everyday, but for the next 5-6 weeks (until the first of the year), we will be working on projects and I will focus our learning on them.

Our first project is next week, the Operation Christmas Shoebox project. I think that we will do our math everyday to get it out of the way, and then we will spend some time purchasing items for our shoe box, reading and learning about the children where these boxes go. That should provide a geography lesson, a lesson in agriculture (or lack of agriculture in some areas), some economics and political science discussions, perhaps a discussion of the meaning of "wealth" and how it is relative to your immediate environment. We should have to do some math, sticking to our budgets when we shop. There will be artwork and teamwork involved as we wrap our packages and get them ready with our local hs friends. We will have our Odyssey of the Mind meeting, Civil Air Patrol will provide drill time, physical fitness time and an actual flight in an airplane for Josh, guitar lessons and swimming with Grandpa will fill out Max's extra's. Our trip to the vet to have Libby's stitches out should round out the week nicely.

The following week is Thanksgiving week. We will have some math every day, and spend the beginning part of the week writing Thank- you notes to the soldiers we have adopted. I think we will spend some time learning about the geography of Iraq, so that we can understand what the soldiers are experiencing for weather and living conditions. That should spark some discussion of what to send in our packages. This week will also be focused on making lists and gathering ideas for what we would like to give/make/do for our family for the holidays this year. The week will finish with making homemade Hanukkah cards for Aunt Pam and Uncle Frank. Guitar lessons and Color Guard and training of guinea pigs for 4H will fill in the odds and ends this week.

Not sure if my idea is going to work out yet or not, but I really needed to think outloud, and this blog is a great place to do that.