 Hey, everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be our mid-year update. So in case you have forgotten, I will link up here what we said back in, I believe it was July, that our plans for third grade were going to be. And I won't say that it's changed a lot, but a lot of things have changed since I said that. So when I made the plans for third grade, we didn't know that Kevin was actually gonna be coming home full-time to be with us. And so some things have changed because of that for the better. He's taken on a few subjects and a few things that he's been teaching, and our lifestyle in general has changed. And that's caused some things in our homeschool to change. So today I'm gonna be telling you all about those changes, give you an update of where we're at, kind of what we're doing really good at, what we're failing at, and what we hope to do differently in this second semester. So the biggest thing that's changed since Kevin has come home is our schedule. Our routine is still the same. Luckily, we've always kind of had a really good flow to our day, and that is that whenever Emily wakes up, she does whatever I've strewn for her, or she will play quietly with something, and then we do our morning basket together, and then we would do our table time, and then lunch with either a show, a podcast, or an audio book, and then we would move on to whatever our afternoon activity was. Well, with Kevin coming home and me and Emily being night owls, everything has shifted even later in our day. So it's just a little bit different than it was. The only thing that's really changed is our lunch and table time have switched. Normally, we are waking up, doing our morning basket, and then doing lunch with a show or a podcast, and then our table time, because like I said, everything's moved a little bit later in the day, and then we still do our afternoon activities, which are either doing something together as a family or one-on-one with Emily, or afternoon classes that Emily takes online. So that hasn't changed a ton. It's just kind of been bumped backwards a few hours. So we are night owls, and we prefer to stay up till like midnight to 1 a.m. and sleep till like 10 or 11. If we're being honest, it's kind of my dream schedule, so I am totally okay with that change. Our one thing for this year was art. That's what we decided on as a family, and we really all kind of banked on the fact that Kevin coming home full-time meant that that was gonna be an easy one for us, but guess what? It hasn't been. We have totally flopped at our one thing so far this year. Now, we have plans to change that because luckily we're only halfway through the year, and we can try to rectify that and get in some more art in the second half, but we have literally done one chakrasa lesson the entire first semester of our homeschool year. That's it. I mean, Emily's doing tons of crafts on her own. Kevin is obviously always doing art for the Wallach way, but we just haven't done any art in our homeschool, at least not very much. When we had planned for that to be our one thing. We just haven't gotten a whole lot of it, but it's kind of been a weird year. So we're totally chalking that up to, oh well, let's try to do better. For math and language arts, our original plan was to do the Evanmore Daily fundamentals and then supplement with the math and language fundamentals when needed and also supplement with things like Life of Fred and some activities and the Right Star Math games. And that worked really well. However, we have decided that it's time to shake things up a little bit and a few new things have happened. We have found Knight Zookeeper, which has been excellent for Emily in her writing. She absolutely loves, and I have seen her blossom as a writer, even though she's typing. It has just been great for that. She missed her Grammar Galaxy story, so we've gone back to Grammar Galaxy and she wanted to try out teaching textbooks when they switched over to the new 4.0. So she's been doing that for about two months and really enjoying that as well. So we're still in doing some of the Evanmore either Daily fundamentals or we're supplementing with the math and language arts when she needs extra help on a specific concept. But we've also added in teaching textbooks, Knight Zookeeper, and we have returned to the Grammar Galaxy stories because she loves them so much. And as an auditory learner, she just soaks up so much out of just the story itself. So that's what we're doing right now for math and language arts. And then of course, with a ton of books and games as well. For history, my plan was to do a minimum of one who was unit a month. And I am super proud to report that that is one thing that we have not only done, we have gone further than that. We have done one to three every month so far. So that is like the one thing that we have actually done that I said I was going to do and I'm thrilled about it. The who was units have been so, so perfect for our homeschool because we can dive in and out, we can add more, we can let Emily choose, follow her lead with it. They've just been perfect, absolutely love them. And I love, love, love how easy they are to incorporate. For geography and science, my plan was for us to do traveling the world and we are still going to be doing that. We just haven't started yet. We will be starting that now in the second semester. What we were able to do though was do a ton of traveling the parks and then actually travel to a handful of the parks. So that was really fun to be able to learn about them and then to actually go travel to them. Another thing that we have done is added in holiday fun around the world. And that is because if there was ever a year that needed more fun and celebrations, 2020 was definitely it. And we had so much fun learning and celebrating together that we've actually extended that and we're trying to make that around the world like the whole year. So we are growing that curriculum as we're doing it with Emily and we just so excited to be able to celebrate and have fun together while we're learning as a family because we love celebrating the little things. So why not celebrate the big things and learn a little bit about cultures and the way they observe things at the same time. Next we have science. Now I had planned to design this huge zoology unit for Emily but that was before Kevin came home. And then Kevin came home and they actually have started doing like a STEM science thing once a week and it has been so fun to see them enjoying doing that together. And I found a really, really awesome veterinarian class on out school for Emily. So it was introduction of veterinarian and then advanced veterinary medicine, I believe one, two, three, four and five which will carry her for like three or four years if she takes all of them. She loves the teachers. They're long like 12 week classes and they've just been so great. So between that and what Kevin and her have been doing on their time together which is like subscription boxes and science kits, that's really what we've been doing for science. Plus there's a lot of animal science mixed in with traveling the parks and traveling the world. So that's kind of what we've done for science so far this year. All of the subscriptions that we signed up for at the beginning of the year have all been hits. Everybody loves them. So we will definitely be keeping those around. The letters that we're receiving are letters from afar, writings from the wild, the heritage letters and the American heritage adventure. So between those four we have world geography, American geography, American history and animals and that's kind of like a little bit of everything. And then the subscription boxes that we've been receiving are universal yums, my zoo box and the Kiwi tinker crate as well as we recently in the last two or three months signed up for the land of story books. So between those we have again, world geography, animal science, STEM and literature. So we are really enjoying all of those and they just kind of add that extra a little bit of pizzazz to our homeschool. It's really awesome to get something in the mail to be able to open it for it to be a surprise and for it to be things that we can enjoy either sitting down and reading together or sitting down and doing together. And then last is online classes. Emily has been taking a ton of out school classes. I will have the link in the description box down below so you can see all of the classes that she's taken and enjoyed so far this year if you're looking for classes for your little ones too. And she's also really enjoyed her Lego classes. She absolutely loves doing Lego with Miss Bethany every week. I love that they are following along at Password to Adventures in their Lego class. So it's really cool for me to be able to hear them learning about something I wrote and the different topics and I like that she's able to build things based off of those. So she is kind of redoing part of Password to Adventures. She's reading that book independently now which is so awesome each week as she does the Lego class with Miss Bethany. And then we still have our subscription to Chalk Pastel, No Sweat Nature Study and Squilt and we absolutely love them. We haven't done nearly as many as I would like this year. All in all, with all things considered, I think the first half of our school year has gone really well. Things I would like to change in the second half of the school year is I would love to get to more of our classes like Chalk Pastel, No Sweat Nature Study and Squilt Live. I would also love to be getting in more art period. And then another thing that we have or I have decided is very important to me has always been important to me and that is kind of the adventuring together, going on adventures. When I read Greta Eskridge's Adventuring Together book, it really made me realize though that adventures don't have to be grand, which I had kind of put in my mind all of our adventures on hold because of the pandemic. And reading that book really reminded me that they don't have to be huge in order to be important. So, or memorable and make connections, like there doesn't need to be this big grand thing for it to matter basically. So that's another thing I would really like to start doing more is doing adventures, even if that's just, you know, going to one of our state parks right down the road or going to whatever things happen to be open that we can go to like museums, art things, you know, whatever we can do, I wanna try to do. So that's the things that I would like to change in the second semester. I would also like to get in more read-alouds. We've been getting in quite a few, but I don't feel like we're nearly where we normally are this time of year in the past. And that might just be, you know, because things are different this year. I'm not really sure, but I would like to get in more read-alouds too. But other than that, I think this year has gone really well. We're on track for what I wanted us to be on track for, all things considered. And I'm excited to see where the rest of this year leads. I would love to hear about your year so far. So how is your homeschool year going? Has it been at all what you expected? Are you where you hope to be? Are you enjoying the things you're doing? Have you changed things in the second semester? Let me know in the comments down below.