What I've Been Up To Lately

Well, I suppose the first thing should mention, is my latest reveal, which went up on Monday. I got to work with one of my favorite tools and products, Imaginisce's I-rock and new bling and stencils. This is my favorite layout of my reveal! Go here: http://www.acherryontop.com/articles/New-I-Rock-Bling%21-14467
and check it out! (Sorry, the link button isn't working for me for some reason.)
Other than scrapbooking, I am still working on my ongoing homeschooling organization project. I just got a brand new heavier-duty three hole punch and whole bunch of binders for organizing all my printed material. Now if you're a homeschool mom, I'm sure you'll understand why a new three hole punch is exciting to me, LOL! My old one I've had since college when I was studying to be an elementary school teacher. The bottom was cracked and the punch had a tendency to stick. Not so much fun to use when you're working your way through a foot tall stack of printed unit studies, lapbooks, worksheets and Dover coloring pages! The new one punches like a dream, so I'm happy.

And in my neverending search for ways to get cheap materials/books for homeschool, I've finally joined Paperback Swap. I took a good honest look at my bookshelves and was able to cull quite a bit to post. So far I've mailed out a total of 26 books. I've received 6 so far and have 13 more on the way to me. All books that I'll be using for school. And since it only costs me the postage to send out the books, it's cheaper even than buying used books. I'm loving it!

Avery and I are now in our third week of summer semester. We've been learning about plants/gardening, homes and this week is community helpers. We're also doing a summer long study to introduce Avery to the United States. We've done an overview already and now we're moving onto indvidual states. One every day, in alphabetical order. I'm excited to see how quickly Avery is already recognizing the names of the different states, whereas before now, she really only knew Washington and Montana, where most of her cousins live. We've got a fun summer ahead of us, that's for sure!

Time for a Change of Pace

I haven't blogged since the beginning of the month and there's a fairly good reason. I haven't scrapped since then, either! The time has come when scrapping can really no longer be my first priority. Avery is ready to move on to more serious schooling, so I need to be putting my focus on that.

I'm an eclectic homeschooler, which basically means that I pull my curriculum together from many different sources. I've been amassing curriculum and books since before Avery was born. Over the past few weeks, I've *finally* been putting it in order, along with buying more additional items, because just like with scrapbooking, I can also never have too many homeschool materials! I'm still not quite there yet with my organizing, but I want to get going on our summer session, so I'm just going to plunge ahead and keep working on it as time allows. We're doing things pretty light for the summer. Some thematic units covering basic stuff she would cover if she went to public school kindergarten, like community, transportation, citizenship, etc. We're also going to do a summer long study of the States and begin studying French, using Hooked on French.

I'm planning to blog more about homeschooling in the future. That's what this blog really started out as, anyway. Scrapbooking just kind of took it over for a while!