His Treasure Seekers

 I’m a bit late in writing about last week because life got crazy as we approached the weekend.  Between two family parties and then a Sunday morning trip to urgent care with two sick kids, I just couldn’t find time to write about our first week back after the holidays until now.

Bible/Circle Time

As I mentioned last week, I’ve given up trying to do a morning Bible time in addition to what we do in the evenings.  Instead, I’ve been putting on a Bible story video each day while the kids eat breakfast.

We started our school time reading two chapters of Little Pilgrim’s Progress each day that we were home.  On Monday as an introduction, we watched the video The John Bunyan Story from the Torchlighters series.

I’m having Ian put together his own book telling the story, so we first did a page “About the Author,” and then I hope to have him do one for each chapter of the book.  (Some days we combined both chapters on one page.)  Once we’re finished (if we keep it up), he’ll have his own book of the story.  This week he finished four pages:

I’m also requiring Elijah to stay with us while we read the story each day, though he doesn’t have any written assignments for it.

Math

Ian started into multiplication and division this week with lessons 91-95 in Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2).  I was surprised at how quickly he caught on.  It almost seemed easier for him than addition and subtraction.  He’s back to working on xtramath.org each morning to keep trying to master his addition facts.

Literature

We didn’t quite get caught up on our literature selections in Ambleside Online, Year 1, but we did make some good progress.  For the first time, Ian really got into our story in James Herriot’s Treasury for Children.  We were just supposed to read “Blossom Comes Home,” but he wanted to keep reading, so we went a head a little.  He also requested the stories as we were driving since I keep the audiobook CDs in our van.  It’s always hard to win him over to new audio resources at first (he loves his favorites too much to risk branching out), and I think sitting with the book helped him realize what great stories these are.

History Cycle

We finished up learning about Alexander the Great before Christmas, so we started moving on to the ancient Romans this week.  I introduced Rome by reading the story of Romulus and Remus from Story of the World, Vol. 1 by Susan Wise Bauer and Chapter 30: “Picking A Fight” in A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer.  Then we started Our Little Roman Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles.

Science

In The Human Body we covered lessons 24-26 on the circulatory system.  Ian added the heart to his life-sized chart of the body from the My Body unit from Teacher Created Resources. (I downloaded it from CurrClick, but it’s also available as a book from Amazon).  We also watched two episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy: Blood and Circulation and Heart.