This and that: An update on how we are homeschooling while moving.

Life is full of changes. Sometimes it's exciting and other times it can be stressful.  And in our case right now, it's both!

We are just a couple weeks away from moving out of our house and into a rental while we build our new place on 10 acres.

 It's something we have prayed about for quite some time and feel that God wants for us.  But when things get complicated and don't go as planned it makes me start to question.  Is it my desires just convincing me that this is what we should do?

Recently I listened to a sermon where the pastor gave a reference to the story in Numbers where Moses sends 12 spies into the land of Canaan that he was going to give to them.  They came back with wonderful reports of how amazing the land was.  But... But there were giants in the land and they were afraid to proceed.  And because they focused on the giants they failed to focus on the promises God had made to them and an entire generation never saw the promised land.
 So my goal right now is to focus on my faith in God.  That he will show us how to deal with the giants.  
  
Preparing to Move
The logistics of moving with livestock and while homeschooling can get a little tricky.  Luckily my parents are willing to keep our goats for us and we found a new home for our chickens.  I miss having the goats around and the barn is so lonely without all of the critters.

 But since we will be living in town for a few months, there wasn't really another option.  I'm hoping we can at least get a temporary barn built and we have two large dog kennels we are going to set up for our goats until we get the property fenced.  So for now we only have our cat.

When it comes to homeschooling, we have pared down to only the basic necessities.  Which still adds up to quite a bit of stuff.  All of our daily supplies are in two crates and then we have two more crates of read-aloud books and Busy Bags/Activites.

We have added a few fun ideas to make our school more "on-the-go".   I used some ideas I found regarding a Mini-Office for Kindergarten and First Grade and a Calendar Notebook that I read about on Homeschool Creations but just made it a little bigger.  It has reference info and memory work reminders.  It's on a large piece of cardboard that can be folded up and put away or easily taken out when it's time for school.

We also started using lapbooks.  Why didn't I start using these sooner!  We are having so much fun!  We have been reading Charlotte's Web for awhile now and I was looking for some coloring pages to go along with it when I ran across this site.  I printed out the activities and we have been putting them on cardstock in a binder instead of file folders.  Both girls love to browse through the binder to see what they have already worked on.  And they are very proud of their narration pages and especially like to look those over.  

Sometimes it's nice to have a challenge to help you declutter and focus on the basics. Trying to see the blessings among the chaos!