I keep forgetting to upload pictures as we’re madly enjoying our last week of break and I’m lesson planning for school. Here’s a little dump of our last days of summer!
Susie has really gotten confident in the water this year. Here she is, practicing her freestyle (she still needs to get her arms up and out more) while Elizabeth prepares to swim across to me. And look at Janie hanging out in the pink floatie with our friend Amanda Mae!
Our new charter school, Inspire, is already so much better than Golden Valley was. Besides more freedom and trust between the administration and parents and the extra $600/child we’re getting, they also have teachers organizing beach days and meet-ups on a weekly basis all over LA. Last Friday, we went down to a new beach in Santa Monica and made several new friends. And of course the kids loved the beach. We’ve been almost every week since getting back from the Midwest.
Inspire had a park day yesterday, complete with curriculum exchange (I finally cleared out some hand-me-downs that we’ll never use, and came home with about 20 books, including art books I’d just put on my amazon wishlist, Getting Started With Latin which I’ve been wanting to buy for years, a dozen childhood of famous Americans biographies (one of which Elizabeth sat down and read from cover to cover before dinner), two DK-type books about the ocean, and several children’s classics like The Secret Garden!) and a sample Shakespeare class from one of Inspire’s vendors. The kids LOVED it. Here they are, acting out Bottom from Midsummer Night’s Dream (Tommy and Elizabeth to the right, Susie just in front of the guy teacher). Unfortunately, the Shakespeare classes are all about an hour away from us (without traffic), so we can’t take them. But someday we will!
