Wrapping Up Week 1 (2014-15)

Posted on July 12, 2014 by Deanna

Our first week flew by! I’ve decided that this year I want to write a weekly wrap-up of what we’re doing. One of my main purposes in blogging has been to have a record of what we do, and I’ve found myself looking back to old posts more frequently than I thought I would when I want to find activities or links to go with certain books or Bible studies.

So I apologize if these posts are tedious to everyone else, but they’re really going to help my scatter-brain keep track of the things we cover this year! Here’s what we did this week:

Bible

Morning Proverbs: Wisdom and the Millers (Chapters 16-20), Proverbs 13:1-12 (We just read 2-3 verse each morning and discuss them.)

Story: The exiles return to start building the temple (Ezra 1-4). We read Week 76 in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, which lined up well with Bible Road Trip Year One Week 30. We did the BRT research, but we didn’t get through all the Bible reading because it covered the whole book of Ezra, which we’ll finish up next week. We watched the first episode of What’s in the Bible Vol. 7, “Ezra and Nehemiah,” and some extra research in the Rose Guide to the Temple. (The boys love the pictures in the Rose Guides.)

I want to do quite a bit of “notebooking” with Ian this year, but I’m holding off on a Bible notebook for now. We’ll wait until we start the New Testament in a few weeks.

Arianna and I started reading through The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, but I’m not sure if we’ll be able to keep that up. She loves the pictures, and we read through several pages at one sitting, but it’s hard to schedule anything consistently with her.

Literature (Ambleside Online)

I’ve been looking forward to starting Ambleside Online Year 1 since Ian was a toddler, and our first week did not disappoint! He really enjoyed the poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses each day as well as most of the readings. (He didn’t complain about any, but some he was definitely more into than others.)

We’re using Leslie Laurio’s paraphrase of Parables from Nature by Margaret Gatty because I had heard many people saying their children had a hard time with that book. I was surprised by how much Ian loved the story of the caterpillar learning to have faith about becoming a butterfly, so I think it was a good choice. I’m hoping that later on perhaps we can read the original version, once he’s gotten more familiar with the book.

Ian’s already a fan of Thornton W. Burgess, as the boys have been listening several of his books on their iPod for the last few years. So when we started reading The Burgess Bird Book, Ian was delighted to discover familiar characters were part of his school work. After we read about Jenny Wren we listened to recordings of what wrens sound like.

Grandma recently returned from a trip to the UK, so it was fun to start Our Island Story, though Ian was a little confused by the mythological beginning. I know we’ll come across many references to Greek and Roman gods in classic literature, so it was a good introduction. (We’ve talked a lot about false gods during our study of the Old Testament, so it wasn’t a completely new idea.)

We continued picking away at the Year 1 “free reads” with The Velveteen Rabbit. (We started working through this list a few months ago with Little House in the Big Woods, Peter Pan and Charlotte’s Web.) Since there wasn’t a scheduled fairy tale this week, we also started “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book.

I was so thankful I had gone ahead and purchased the bundle of 225 ebooks from Yesterday’s Classics a while back. Many of the books we’ll be reading with Ambleside Online are included, as well as lots of other wonderful choices for free reading.

In addition to our AO reading, we’re also reviewing a program called Lightening Literature 1st Grade, from Hewitt Homeschooling, which had us spending the week with Madeline, an old favorite of ours.

History Cycle

In addition to the Ambleside Online history selections, we’ll be lightly covering Creation through Christ in preparation for doing our own history cycle next year starting with the early church through the Reformation.

This week we read the Creation story and talked about early man. We read chapter one in Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World, Vol. 1 a few weeks ago, so I didn’t do much more this week besides listening to several selections on the CDs that go with Diana Waring’s History Revealed curriculum. (I purchased the Ancient Civilizations full CD set from Answers in Genesis and am really enjoying the fascinating information she shares!) They were more for me since they’re not quite on Ian’s level, but I chose to only have them on when he was around and I know he was listening and picking up on quite a bit.

We started a history notebook, which is going to be really simple this year, just including pictures from the Homeschool in the Woods History Through the Ages-Collection CD, which has timeline figures from every period of history. I won’t be doing anything fancy with Ian’s history notebook this year, but I wanted to start developing the habit.

As a fun extra, we watched Buddy Davis Adventures: Extreme Caving, which is a fun, Creation-based DVD that teaches a lot about caves and even has a segment on early man.

Science

This year we’re going through the God’s Design for Life curriculum from Answers in Genesis. (There are 4 years to the God’s Design for Science series, so if we like them I’m planning to use it as a cycle until all my children have gone through it at least once.) I really like the way this curriculum is designed to be used from 1st-8th grade with specific readings and activities for younger and older students. We’re going to stick with the suggestions for the lower grades unless there’s a subject Ian wants to spend more time studying.

There are three books to go through in God’s Design for Life , which fits well with the structure of our year since Ambleside Online uses three terms. During the first term of this year we’ll be going through The World of Animals. This week we read through the introductory chapters and began studying mammals. I plan on having Ian keep a science notebook as well, but we only got as far as labeling the first section. We’ll be reading about mammals for the next couple weeks, so he’s got plenty of time for notebooking.