Wrapping Up Week 11 (2015-16)

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Deanna

I love that we’ve gotten into such a good groove this year that every week feels productive. I think it’s mostly due to the fact that the boys are working independently on so much, freeing me to stay on top of the household and the little ones for a good portion of the day. Of course, a big part of it is that I have SO much more energy now that I’m no longer pregnant. Maybe I’m odd, but I find life with a newborn far less tiring than pregnancy.

This week in our Preschool

Arianna and Nico had a fun week doing purposeful activities while the boys did their schoolwork each morning. I’ve set up this little table for them on the far side of our school room, and it’s close enough that they feel like they’re with us, yet separate enough that they’re not a distraction. This week they kept busy playing with unifix cubes, painting with watercolors, and doing lots of coloring.

I also gave Arianna a few simple alphabet dot-to-dots, and she was quite tickled to be doing “real” school work.

We finished the week doing nature study with Daddy, spending a few hours at a local nature center. Nicholas loved discovering acorns, and especially liked the ones with “hats” that he could take off. All the boys had fun collecting them, and Ian was fascinated when I told him about how the Native Americans ground them to use the flour for cooking. We’ll have to go back and gather more to try out a recipe or two.

Read Alouds

For history we continued reading King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. I’m really glad we’re going through these. I’ve read many modern variations of the Arthur stories, and reading an older one is helping me figure out a lot. Ian’s enjoying them as well.

For fun, we continued James Howe’s “Bunnicula and Friends” series with Return to Howliday Inn. We also started Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers, in an attempt to get through most of the books from Ambleside Online “free reads” for Year 2.

Writing

The boys are really enjoying the writing class they’re a part of this year. We’re going through Fables, Myths and Fairy Tales: Writing Lessons in Structure & Style from the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW). The book itself is geared toward 3rd-5th grade, but since many of the kids in the class are younger, we’re going through it at a pace the boys can follow pretty well (though I let Elijah dictate a lot to me since he’s still working on learning to actually write).

I think Ian’s favorite part is just being there with his friends and getting to feel like he’s in “real school.” He loves participating in class, but he’d be perfectly happy to skip the homework. Elijah, however, loves the whole idea of writing the stories, and ever since we introduced adjectives, he’s been getting great delight from finding the perfect words to use as he retells the stories.

To help the boys remember the various parts of speech I let Ian pick out a book of Mad Libs, and we’re having fun practicing our nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (plus more!)with DC Comics Super Hero Mad Libs.

Independent Learning

The boys are continuing to go through their Spanish lessons from Middlebury Interactive Languages, and Ian just finished the tenth week of lessons in his Veritas Press history course. Both courses have been a big hit, and I’m thankful that they’re working independently and learning so much!

Language Skills

I’m currently requiring the boys to spend time on Reading Eggs twice a week, but I’ve been giving them a lot of freedom as to what they did each time. This past week Elijah got started on Reading Eggspress, and I realized that both of the boys would really benefit from the reading comprehension lessons, so now I’m having them go through at least one of those each week.

Math

Elijah started working through Teaching Textbooks Math 3 this week, and so far he’s doing well. The only problem it’s created is that both boys now have to use the one computer it’s installed on to do their math lessons, so I have to make sure they each have something else to work on when the other one is on the computer.