The Sellers Family Homeschool Blog

Ok, as you will have seen, my blog has gone somewhat ...erm...minimalist. To be honest, I was totally and utterly fed up with the overall "twee-ness" of it and wanted a complete change. I thought this was going to take AGES but my wonderful hubby got on and did it straight away (I think he knew that every time I looked at it, it was driving me batty lol)

He's also tidied up the sidebar - put the long, strangling archives into a dropdown box, cleared out a few of the links and stuff like that.

It might not be so colourful now, but it feels SOOOO much better (like when you completely de-clutter your house!)

I'm still undecided what to do about Me and Mum. I got some comments from the contact form today and I thought woo-hoooo! BUT it turned out to be some crappy spam type stuff. Fantastic, that didn't take long :( The whole thing is NOT making me happy.

The Montessori site is definately staying :) I can tell from the site stats that it gets a lot of visits and I'm very proud of it (plus we obviously still use some of the stuff!), so stay it will.

On the home-ed front - we have decided NOT to use Oak Meadow (for a variety of reasons too boring to go into here!) I've been reading a lot of Cindy Rushtons books lately about notebooking and so forth so we've decided to do that along with lapbooks and daily maths drills (not going to bother with a "proper" maths curriculum because Rosie does so much maths in a natural day to day way so a quick morning drill is all that's needed). I found a wonderful site where you can get absolutely hundreds of free maths drill worksheets here. What I think we really need to do is just get into a habit of doing "something" every day. That is what has been lacking in our house and I do like to have a bit of structure with the learning and Rosie seems to enjoy it too.

As for the kids themselves ....Rosie is happily enjoying Grade 1 in ballet that she moved up to a few weeks ago (nearly bankrupting us with the cost of the fees and uniform!) She is very excited because the dates of their next "big" show have been fixed for May next year and what the show will be should be announced fairly soon. The Disney one she did last year was wonderful so we can't wait! :) She still has massive eating issues - ie she just doesn't eat, very much. Now, this ISN'T to do with the ballet (in case your wondering!), nope, she has just NEVER eaten very well from the time she was born. Picky doesn't even come close to it and we've tried endless solutions to try and get her to eat (her painfully stick-like arms are starting to seriously worry us) more, but nothing we try works. Any suggestions, most gratefully received. Other than that, she is SUCH a gorgeous child - so sweet and kind, utterly brilliant with April, never moans about doing any homeschool work and desperately keen to help out around the house. I just wish she'd eat more!

April is the cutest little thing. She toddles around, getting under your feet but being so adorable you just can't get annoyed about it lol! She has a hugely increasing vocabulary - "up there!" (when telling us to put Barbie on the back of the sofa so she can knock her down again!), "garden" and "osie" (Rosie!) being her latest words. She (thank heavens!) DOES eat properly - anything and everything in fact and is a chubby little so-and-so (hmmm, wonder where she gets that from!) She likes to scribble with crayons and play with her Tigger radio but most of all she loves to be outside - all the time. She'll point to her trainers, sit on the floor and point to her feet to tell you she wants to go out! She still has the insanely irritating habit of completely emptying the drawers in her bedroom though which drives me mad. I've got to the stage where I don't even bother to sort them now so all her pj's, tshirts and trousers are completely jumbled up where they just get stuffed back in!

Nothing else to report other than I've got a cold but nothing too major thankfully.

So there you go, a little roundup! :)