This Rugged JoyFull Home

The first of October and my daughter gets done with her 3rd quarter homeschool portfolio. I know, it's just the third quarter of our school year, three down and one more to go but somehow we always find a reason to celebrate different occasions in our homeschooling. For example, someone gets a perfect score on a quiz one morning, we run to the nearest grocery to get a gallon of ice cream to celebrate that little victory, sometimes never going back to school again later that day, we get carried away.  Someone loses his last and overdue milk tooth, then we pop open Pringles and sodas in revelry of this significant loss, we find ourselves lounging in the family room for too long and later get amused that it's already dinner-time. Still, someone learns how to read phonetically and we get elated that everyone's reading in the family, we find ourselves staying up late at night watching impromptu movie marathon. Maybe we're that kind of homeschoolers; serious learners but fu...

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that one day I will be driving through the congested streets of Metro Manila and to actually DO LIFE here on a semi-permanent basis. I mean, I love travelling to Manila, but it is the traffic situation here that I dreaded ever since. I'd tell my kids, "pinch me, pinch me, this is just a dream..." as we sat in traffic most of the time when we had to run errands, pick up our groceries, or go to church, or go to their piano lessons at school. A fruitful day would come by so fast and it was interesting to note that my 14 year-old girl and my nine year-old boy have adjusted well to our new environment in no time. We. are. home. I wish I could say that our homeschooling journey has always been predictable and turned out the way we planned it to be. But I would be lying. Take this incident that happened to us last week on our way back to Manila from a short visit to our beloved Batangas City. Driving from Manila to Batangas via C5 road -...

Are you ready for a walk along the park? Get ready because I've asked my daughter to walk you through her quarterly portfolio, to show you a sample of what is going on in our homeschooling, our learnings, our adventures, our family values. Below is a sample of what my daughter would include in her quarterly portfolio. She has chosen the reflective form of presenting her ideas where she  applied subject integrations and their applications in real life. I hope that you will enjoy the walk, take time to look at each slide and perhaps pick up something good along the way.