Journal Writing, Community Service and More

We just returned from an amazing vacation. It was exciting, educational and left me inspired and oh so excited about life in general! We packed in so much! That said, I know I’m behind on lots of things — for one thing I usually have blog posts ready a week or two out… but having been on the road for so long, I’m plum out of posts (except the Wednesday games). Oh–and I’m also behind on email, laundry and preparation for school in case you’re wondering! But that’s why it’s closing in on midnight Sunday night and here I sit rambling on!

One of the best things about our holiday was that we spent a large portion of it with another homeschooling family. The kids played incredibly well together and I had long chats with my friend talking into the wee hours of the morning!  We talked about everything from our past to our hopes and dreams for our kids. My friend is absolutely amazing (and inspiring!) and I came back with a slew of new ideas we plan to incorporate into our life.

Here’s an example, she had her kids write in a journal every night. They started years ago and they started off writing things down for their kids. Now her older daughter writes in her own journal while she still writes for her son.  They often saved things from the day (an admission ticket, a postcard or whatever) and pasted them into their journals. My kids saw their friends writing each night and were excited to start doing this too. So today we made a trip to Staples and I let the kids pick out their own journals. Yup! We started this evening!

It’s been a long time since I’ve had hours upon hours to chat with a friend (aside from Hubby, that is). And we touched on so many things. I told her a lot of stories from my past. A long time ago I taught in a Quaker school.  I loved the fact that our entire school did community service for a week.  In fact, I got as much from it as the high school students! One year another teacher and I took some kids on a road trip down to Sonora, Mexico to help build a school house.  It was an amazing experience. Below are a few photos from that trip from a long-lost photo album:

(We topped off the trip by hiking down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and out in one “quick” day-trip with the students! It was amazing — and incredibly draining!)

Anyway, during that conversation about community service my friend said that she and her kids volunteer once or twice a month at a local food pantry. I thought that was great (inspiring really… especially because my friend and her husband both work and their kids are active in sports and music, etc. etc.). To make a long story short, my friend got us in touch with the director of the food bank and the kids and I are going to bag apples to distribute this next week. It’s small, but hopefully it’s helpful and the kids learn from the experience. We’re hoping to help out twice a month for a couple of hours.

That’s about it for now!

If you were looking for a more school-inspired post you might want to browse through the freebies posts to see if there’s anything you can use. Or, spend some time browsing through the various categories in the right sidebar. I have most everything categorized pretty well so you can find posts on anything from science experiments, math, oceans, Japan, or the American West to preschool, geography and more.

And as many of you know I’m on Facebook and keep a running log of all the posts I’ve written. Another quick, easy way to see what we’ve been up to!

As I pointed out above, it’s very late so I need to bring this to a close.  I’ll share my first post about our travel adventures tomorrow… our visit to a mysterious mansion with lots of secret doors!! It was awesome! Hope you stop by to check it out!

Have a great day!