His Treasure Seekers

Is it just me, or was October the longest month ever?  I can’t begin to describe how thankful I am to be in November at last.  We ended October with a great week of school.  I normally try to do a little history and science twice a week, but Ian was so into what we were doing that we ended up spending one long day on science and then one long day on history.  I don’t know if we’ll adjust our schedule permanently, but it was great to see him enjoying our subjects so much.

Bible

This week in Old Story New we looked at the story of Jesus clearing the temple.  Since we’re not doing a separate program in the morning anymore I’d like to find a way to do some notebooking related to our evening devotions, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

We finished Prudence and the Millers.  Ian has really enjoyed these books, and we still have one more, but I think I’m going to save it for later while I figure out how I want to use our morning Bible time.

Math

This week in Ian’s MEP lessons (Year 2, #56-60) we worked on double-digit addition crossing tens.  Ian’s main struggle seems to be related to not knowing his basic addition facts.  We have tried several methods to help with these (all basically fancy flashcards on the computer) that just have not worked for him because they were missing an element of fun.  So I went searching for some sort of game that could help his addition facts become more automatic.  I found Medieval Math, a free game he can play on my Kindle Fire, and so far it seems to be a hit.  That is, he really likes it, but only time will tell if it helps fulfill its purpose.

Literature/Ambleside Online

In addition to our regular Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading for Week 15, we read the d’Aulaires’ Pocahontas (one of the free reads we need to get to this week).  Ian and I were both fascinated by the story, so then we watched Animated Hero Classics: Pocahontas, which went along with the book really well. (Ian also wants to watch the Disney Pocahontas, so we’re saving that for our next family movie night.  I’ve never seen Pocahontas II, but since they’re both available on Netflix right now we may watch that one as well to see how it compares to the details of her life that we read about.)

History Cycle

This week for our study of Ancient Greece we finished Our Little Athenian Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles and began Our Little Spartan Cousin of Long Ago (also part of the original e-book bundle from Yesterday’s Classics.)

While I read, Ian worked on two notebook pages using lapbook elements from Tina’s Dynamic Homeschool Plus (PreK-K unit) and Homeschool Share.  I’ve never wanted to venture into the world of lapbooks because I didn’t want to have to figure out what to do with them afterward, but Ian does love creating a notebook, so this seemed like a fun way to incorporate the learning aspects of lapbooking.  He loved having pages with things to open and flip through.

We were reading a chapter about Hiero competing in the Olympics so the page on events in the ancient Olympics was perfect.  He pasted on the appropriate figure from the History Through the Ages-Collection CD so there would be dates on the page.

Also, because we finished the book on Athens, I had him write about what he remembered about Athenian life (using a page from biblestoryprintables.com).  I thought it was interesting that the details that stood out to him most were about how girls were rarely allowed to leave the house but just stayed home to spin and sew.

Science

Ian is really getting into our lessons in The Human Body from God’s Design for Life.  This week we read lessons 4-7 covering the skeletal system.  Ian cut out “Sandy Skeleton” (from the curriculum CD-ROM) and put it together with brads.

Then we read pages 4-5 in The Usborne Human Body Sticker Book and Ian placed all the stickers.

That alone would have been enough, but I decided to get out the My Body unit from Teacher Created Resources (available on CurrClick or Amazon).  We used part of it before (when we rowed Madeline), but now it’s right at Ian’s level.  I’m going to try to do the whole book (or most of it anyway, as I can tie it into our lessons).

The first thing we had to do was trace an outline of his body on a large paper.  We’ll use it for each lesson in the unit, adding different parts of the body as we learn about them.  This week we did the pages on the skeleton.  I had Ian read aloud the page “My Skeleton” (which was mostly a review of things I’d read to him from our textbook and the sticker book so he was able to make out even words like “ligaments” and “cartilage”), and put it in his science notebook along with his “Sandy Skeleton.”  Then he cut out the bones on the other pages and glued them onto the body tracing we had made earlier.