Bracing for Hurricane Sandy and Our School Plans for the Week

Like almost everyone on the East coast, we are getting ready for Sandy. My folks who live in central New Jersey got a call from their township that said,  “be prepared to live without electricity for two weeks…” The center of the storm looks like it will pass right over their house!

We live nestled down in the woods so the most minor storm almost always causes our power to go out for at least a few hours. The storm this summer caused a 3-day power outage and our neighborhood has been known to be out of power for up to a week! In fact, we still have massive tree branches from July to cut up into firewood (pictured below). We’ll see what happens after the wind gust from Sandy!

If you look at the trees that line our road, you can see why branches so often knock out our power!

Luckily we have a wood stove, so the temperature isn’t ever an issue, but we have to be prepared since without electricity we have no well-water or septic.  We filled four large storage tubs with water.  (ED helped with fill the bins!).

We also stocked up on

  • bottled water
  • batteries
  • propane (since we have a little camping stove that we can cook on)
  • and I made lots of food we can heat up (chili, sweet potato casserole, soup)

Plus, we got caught up on laundry. We also made sure our electronics were all charged (cell phones, e-readers, etc.). We brought a supply of wood for the fireplace into the garage (to keep dry). And we brought in our outdoor furniture and things like that.

The rains have just started (Sunday around 10:45pm) — and already the windows are rattling a bit! We’re all sleeping in the basement, just to be safe!

We heard that all the public schools and many businesses in the area have already closed things for Monday. Our homeschool though?  Still in session!  We take so many other breaks that if we’re stuck indoors we may as well have some good productive school days!

I love hearing what others are up to in their homeschool.  Here’s the general plan for this week for my older two (since I’ve talked a lot about ED’s homeschool quite a bit in the past week or so.)

Homeschool Plans this Week

  • We’ll continue with our German lessons (more about that soon, but in the past two weeks we really changed things up with that and it’s going well).
  • DD has been working on multiplication and we’ll be playing lots of games and she’ll continue with that.  LD will continue working on geometry and long division in math.  I’ve been really happy with the geometry book  he’s been working with (we downloaded it from currclick):
  • we’re going to spend another week on grammar before returning next week to spelling. I have some grammar sheets that review comma rules to share with you later this week (when I get that post done, but probably on Thursday).
  • we’ll be doing a couple of projects on Ancient Egypt (umm… I hope!!)
  • last week for science we read through, How to Think Like a Scientist: Answering Questions by the Scientific Method.  (More about that soon). This week I think we’ll focus on reading a few chapters from our Real Science 4 Kids chemistry book.
  • independent reading — the kids always do lots of reading on their own. LD has been racing through the 39 Clues series (I think he’s on book 6 or 7 now.)
  • Read Alouds (with the older 2):
    • We have just a couple more chapters in the second Narnia book (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe) and we’ll be moving on to The Horse and His Boy.
    • LD and I have been reading WWII-themed books. The first book we read together was Number the Stars.  Last week we finished Twenty and Ten. We’ll be moving on to Snow Treasure.
    • DD and I are reading The Rats of NIMH.

That’s about it for our plans for the week. If you’re about to be pummeled by Sandy, good luck and be safe. To everyone else, have a wonderful week!

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