Fab Fridays

I've got 6 kids and only homeschool 2 of them now, which I have to admit is fabulous! I loved homeschooling all my kids but having so many of them and all at different levels and trying to get my older ones into good colleges put an enormous amount of stress on me and took a lot of my time. So who suffered in the meantime?... my younger kids, of course. And I'm one to carry around tons of guilt, loose sleep over it and hopefully make a new choice in the morning. Well, the new day comes along and all those same issue about working with the older kids flooded my day, but again!

I didn't completely ignore the younger kids, please don't get me wrong, we just didn't make time for the "fun stuff." I remember spending time doing all sorts of fun projects with my older kids when they were young. We usually had a 4 day school week so we could do projects or field trips on Fridays. Well, why should my younger kids not have those same great experiences? So, I've repented now for straying from those precious moments and am now having those same fun experiences with my younger kids.

But wait! Let me explain a few things first... I always invite my kids to cook with me in the kitchen, help with odd jobs around the house, we always are reading a book together and we spend time running errands together and of course we have school everyday... but, in my most humble opinion some of these things don't all together count as what we affectionately call our "Fab Fridays". In our family, Fridays have "planned" activities that the kids come up with on their own. They can but don't have to relate to what we are learning in school, but they usually do. Mom needs to know ahead of time what they are planning so I can come up with a short lesson to go along and create notebooking pages or lapbook elements to go along. Sometimes they are things the kids have been interested in or something we studied several years ago and they want to "do it again". Lastly, we add our adventures to a notebook we titled "Fab Fridays" (of course). We add photos and other things that relate to what we did for our activity. If what we did also has something to do with what we are studying we add a copy to that folder as well. So with all this said I'll share some of the things we've been up to lately and I plan on adding a new post every week about our "Fab Fridays."

*** I'll add the "Fab Fridays" to their own post so they can be linked to more easily :)