All Hallows Eve

With more drizzling rain on Sunday we started our week on a wet note. All weekend we'd enjoyed visiting with family, spending time outside, carving a pumpkin, and roasting pumpkin seeds. The rain on Sunday wasn't the downpour type of rain but the steady drizzle that quickly chills you to the bones if you stay out in it. So, the majority of Sunday itself was spent inside the house using various electronic devices and attempting not to step on each others toes while excitement mounted for Halloween.




Monday, All Hallows Eve, the day the campers had been waiting for. The past month and a half all I've heard about is Halloween. I had planned on doing a half day Monday and Tuesday, but in favor of having a longer weekend I lumped both day's lessons together. We didn't start until around noon and were done by two PM. The rest of the afternoon I had bouncy excited campers. We went trick-or-treating with our neighbors (who have been in the area for the past several years and know the best routes) around 5. I even dressed up this year. And ate leftover chili from Sunday night for supper after we got back home. With candy for desert you'd think that they would have been too hyper to sleep but they were all off in dreamland relatively quickly to my surprise.


Tuesday, All Saints Day, the day we've got catechism and our day doesn't end until after 9 PM and that's even without a ton of extra things. The lessons today were actually in the lesson plan for Wednesday (and I moved Friday's lessons to Wednesday ... giving us a four day weekend). Lessons were moved through quickly and all three campers are excited that next week marks the end of the first quarter grading for this school year. (That's only become important for my record keeping since ECJ began high school levels.) We followed one of our less healthy yearly traditions and allowed the campers to eat chips and candy for lunch that they got while trick or treating. Since we rarely buy candy throughout the year they are allowed to binge a bit during the holidays. The girls had a party like environment in catechism for All Saints Day and we attended one of the masses at our parish church. They fell asleep rather quickly after a busy, long day.

Wednesday after lessons we did our oozing pumpkin experiment that the kids have been looking forward to for over a month. Basically you take your jack-o-lantern and turn it into the container to hold your experiment. Then you mix some elephant toothpaste up in a jar that you set inside of your jack-o-lantern. After a few moments you should see your chemical reaction pouring out of at least the mouth of your jack-o-lantern. Hence the title "oozing pumpkins". The campers really enjoy doing this experiment and each time they retain more information about the chemical reaction than they did the previous time. We normally do this experiment outside because of the mess, but we again had that drizzly cold rain falling and so I just put one of my big square pans under the jack-o-lantern to catch the mess. 

Thursday and Friday are now lesson free thanks to a little lesson planning juggling. Thursday we are driving over two hours to go check out a couple of houses. We're contemplating moving and I'll let you know what we choose next week. We may or may not come home Thursday night so I'm publishing this Wednesday evening and I'll link it up to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap up when I get home and can easily do it. I hope all of you had a wonderful Halloween and a great week homeschooling!

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