His Treasure Seekers

This week looked a bit different for us than previous weeks.  In addition to some planned changes, we ended up having several family matters that needed my attention, so things were rather irregular. (In other words we watched a lot of videos and didn’t manage to do any notebooking.)  Here’s what we did manage to spend time on this week:

Bible

Somehow I forgot to take out my lesson plans for Bible Road Trip before the week started, and then when life happened I never got around to it.  We read a couple stories from Matthew in 365 Great Bible Stories at the beginning of the week, but then our only other morning Bible time was watching Built Upon the Rock (from Nest Entertainment’s Animated Stories from the New Testament).

Math

Ian got through lessons 41-45 of Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2) this week, but it wasn’t as easy for him as the previous lessons have been.  Adding whole tens went fine, but now that he’s adding double digits including 5’s he’s having to think a bit more, which I’ve noticed affects his entire attitude.  When everything is easy, he flies through the lessons, but as soon as just one part starts feeling challenging, he gets frustrated and starts to shut down.  He has trouble focusing even on the easy parts, and it takes a lot longer to get through math each day.

Literature/Ambleside Online

This week we finished our first term of Ambleside Online, Year 1!  I’ve been drooling over the AO curriculum for years, so it feels really good to have finally accomplished some of it!  We’ve enjoyed all the reading, though Ian definitely had some favorites.  We didn’t quite finish all the poems in A Child’s Garden of Verses, but we’re going to put in back on the shelf and move onto next term’s poetry selection anyway.

History Cycle

History is where I made the biggest intentional changes to the way we’ve been doing school.  Mystery of History and Story of the World both go through history using a series of separate stories, but I wanted to try a slightly different approach for a while.  Rather than discussing specific episodes in history, I want to help Ian develop a sense of the era.

So this week we began our study of Ancient Greece by reading Our Little Athenian Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles, a classic novel about two boys in Athens.  (It’s part of the original e-book bundle from Yesterday’s Classics.)  Ian enjoyed it, asking for me to read more each day when I’d reached the end of a chapter.  We talked about the Parthenon, the statue of Athena, and a bit about Greek culture.  It also introduced him to some of the characters in Greek mythology, and I plan to read a few myths to him once we finish (hopefully next week).

We also watched 2 Episodes of Drive Thru History: “Ancient History: Greece” and “Ancient History: Athens and Paul” (also available through the TBN Roku channel).

Science

For some reason when I wrote out our schedule of science lessons for the year I didn’t have us finishing up our first of the three books in God’s Design for Life until next week, even though this is officially the end of our first term.  This week we read through lessons 29-31 in The World of Animals.  Because of our circumstances this week we weren’t able to do any extra projects, but the kids did enjoy watching Wild Kratts Season 1, Episode 5 “Mystery of the Squirmy Wormy.”

Extras

Ian did several more lessons in Middlebury Interactive Languages, and I was really thankful that he was able to do them independently, because otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten to Spanish at all this week.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Old Testament iWitness, New Testament iWitness, and iWitness Biblical Archeology by Doug Powell (from Apologia)
• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)
• Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls from New Liberty Videos
• The Legend of St. Nicholas by Dandi Daley Mackall