Wrapping Up Week 8 (2014-15)

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Deanna

Holidays always throw me for a loop when it comes to school. I would rather take off days for family birthdays than things like Labor Day, but since Daddy had the day off, we didn’t want to do school as usual. However, it worked out well this time, since he did go into work on Saturday, so we just shifted our 5-day school week back a day.

Bible

This week in Bible Road Trip: Year Three we started our actual book-by-book study of the New Testament with the first nine chapters of Matthew. I’m having some trouble finding a good level of time to spend on these lessons. The amount of reading in the Lower Grammar assignments is a bit much, even with us doing it together, but the preschool/Kindergarten lessons didn’t feel like enough. (I did end up buying 365 Great Bible Stories, the storybook BRT uses with the younger children, and I do like it, but I felt like Ian needed a bit more “meat.”)

For now, I’m using the Bible storybook with all the children, and then reading shorter passages from the Lower Grammar assignments with Ian. This week I chose to focus on the Beatitudes (in Matthew 5), and I think we’ll work on memorizing them during the three weeks we spend on Matthew. To help with that, I made little laminated cards that we went through each morning, as well as letting all the kids do matching coloring pages. Elijah and Arianna really liked being a part of our school time, so I think I’m going to try to keep including them in as much of our Bible lessons as they can handle.

Math

This week we worked on lessons 21-25 in Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme, which surprised me a little by introducing multiplication. Ian understood it more quickly than he has other new concepts, and we found lots of opportunities to practice as we went about our days. (“If you, Elijah, and Arianna each have 4 crackers, how could you say that as an addition?” “4+4+4=12,” “As a multiplication?” “3×4=12”)

Literature/Ambleside Online

So far I’ve been sticking pretty closely to the reading schedule for Ambleside Online, Year 1, but this week we couldn’t resist going a little further with Paddle-to-the-Sea. Ian was fascinated by the description of the logs going through the sawmill, so I went searching for a video to show us more. Nothing went as in depth as I would have liked, but he did enjoy one that we found. We’re planning to watch the movie of Paddle-to-the-Sea once we finish the book, and I’m hoping it will show Ian what he wanted to see.

Ian was also really excited to start the D’Aulaires’ Benjamin Franklin. I think we’ve talked a little about Franklin before, which is probably why Ian was so interested. Now that we’re spending time talking about him, Ian’s noticing pictures of him and references that used to just slip by him.

History Cycle

This week we really moved away from following the lessons in Mystery of History, Vol.1. Rather than breaking history into specific “episodes,” I want to spend a little more time just focusing on more general topics. This week we talked about the time the Israelites spent as slaves in Egypt, the Exodus, and the battle of Jericho.

I read the chapter entitled “The Wandering Jews” from A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer. It was our first time reading from this book, which I had gotten to use later on with Ambleside Online. It seemed like a good fit, though I did a little editing as we went since Hillyer names the pharaoh of the Exodus period as Ramses, which isn’t accepted as true by many Egyptologists. Overall, however, Ian seemed to pay better attention when I read from this book than he has with some others, so I think we’ll probably use it when it fits in with what I want to cover.

For his history notebook, we used a couple pages from biblestoryprintables.com. We talked through the ten plagues and numbered the pictures. Then I had him tell me the story of the Exodus and I wrote down his words. (I wanted him to focus more on getting the ideas out than on the task of writing.)

Most of what we talked about this week was review, so we just had fun with it. The boys enjoyed revisiting some of their favorite DVDs: the Wars of Humanity combo pack and Jericho: The Promise Fulfilled from Shatterpoint Entertainment, which use LEGO-style bricks and stop motion animation to tell the very Bible stories we were focusing on.

Science

This week we focused on reptiles in lessons 16-19 in The World of Animals (from God’s Design for Life). We read the “Beginners” lessons in the book and did an activity comparing a turtle’s flipper with a tortoise’s claw.

Ian also made a collage of various reptiles for his notebook, and we watched a couple videos: Bill Nye the Science Guy: Reptiles: and Wild Kratts Season 2, Episode 5 “Walk on the Wet Side” (about the Basilisk lizard).

Extras

For Spanish, we finished up our time with Salsa video 113 (the Three Billy Goats Gruff). We’ll be taking a break from Salsa while we review a different Spanish program, but then we’ll jump back into the rest of this unit.

Art lessons have been few and far between this year. We did manage to get to lesson 14 in ARTistic Pursuits K-3 Vol. 2: Stories of Artists and Their Art this week, but we didn’t do the project yet.