Wrapping Up Week 17 (2014-15)
Elijah turned 5 this week, and between the school holiday for his birthday, Nicholas fighting a cold for the third week, and Arianna coming down with something as well, school looked a little lighter than usual. I’ve realized, however, that even when we don’t accomplish everything in my lesson plans, we still manage to do quite a bit. As long as I keep an attitude of flexibility, I can see weeks like this one as successful, even if they bear little resemblance to my written plans.
Bible/Circle Time
This week in Old Story New we covered the early days of Jesus’ ministry as he proclaimed the good news in his hometown of Nazareth and other cities in Galilee.
We continued reading in Thanksgiving: A Time to Remember by Barbara Rainey. I’m try to keep our Thanksgiving focus very simple this year. Ian has already heard so many of the details, so I’m trying to help him think a little more deeply about the Pilgrims’ experience.
To support what we’ve been reading about Thanksgiving, we watched The Mayflower and the First Thanksgiving from Learn Our History and “The Mayflower Voyagers” (part of the This is America, Charlie Brown series).
Math
It was with a great sigh of relief on my part that we moved on to lessons 66-70 in MEP (Year 2). Ian was really starting to struggle with the complex double-digit equations, so it was nice to move onto measurement. He still had a chance to practice the addition and subtraction concepts, but the problems were much simpler, and there were other things that he found easy, so math was not such a battle this week.
I remember getting into a struggle with some difficult material with Year 1, and I tried to make it easier on Ian by breaking down the lessons and doing them over several days. I finally ended up taking a break from MEP, coming back to it a month later and realizing that we were actually just at the point of moving on to something new. When those hard concepts came up again later, Ian did surprisingly well with them.
I tried to keep that experience in mind this year when we hit a difficult patch. I looked ahead and realized that if we could just plow through one or two more lessons, we reach something easier. So I offered Ian a little extra support, walked through the hard problems with him without expecting him to master them, and this week we were rewarded with a change in subject matter. I know we’ll come back to those concepts, but I’m confident that with a little time Ian will be able to sort them all out in his mind and have a better understanding that next time they come around.
Literature/Ambleside Online
We’re a little behind on two books in Ambleside Online, Year 1, but that’s because we’ve been focusing a lot on our history cycle and science over the last couple weeks. I’m sure we’ll be caught up soon.
History Cycle
We finished Our Little Spartan Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles this week, which led neatly into a discussion of the Greco-Persian wars. That’s what we would have been talking about if we had stuck with Story of the World, Vol. 1 as I had planned after dropping Mystery of History. I think using the “Little Cousin” books is actually working really well for Ian. He’s learning a lot through the stories, and he seems to be enjoying them.
This week I introduced the boys to the UK television series Horrible Histories (based on the books by Terry Deary). We’ve only watched episodes that feature a “Groovy Greeks” segment, and it’s been a fun way to reinforce some of the things we’ve read about in our books about Athens and Sparta. (The boys LOVE these shows, and I know we’ll come back to them when we study other periods of history.)
We also watched Kids’ Animated History With Pipo (Classical Greece, Part 1), which gave a good overview of everything we’ve learned about Greece over the last few weeks.
Science
In The Human Body we covered lessons 11-12 on the nervous system and the brain. Ian completed pages 12-13 in The Usborne Human Body Sticker Book and we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Brain.
