Wrapping Up Week 9 (2016-17)

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Deanna

This week we squeezed as much of our regular schoolwork in to the first three days, and then headed out of town with my husband’s side of the family for a classic car event they participate in each year. It was a great chance for the kids to see a new part of California, learn a little more about cars (which are a REALLY big deal to that side of the family), and spend some time with Papa (my father-in-law), their aunt and uncle, and the cousins. In addition to enjoying the beach and the bike trail that runs alongside it, they got to visit the Channel Islands Maritime Museum, which tied into our reading of Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier this year, and we visited the old San Buenaventura Mission to add to our ongoing study of California history. I was surprised by how much Elijah remembered about Junipero Serra, whom we read about back in Week 2 of this school year.

To make sure the days could truly count as school days, I also prepared packets of worksheets for the older boys, using some pages from CC Connected to review our Classical Conversations memory work, plus some grammar and math worksheets that went along with what we’ve been studying lately. They didn’t get through even half of what I prepared because we ended up taking so many little excursions, but I’m still glad I pulled the packets together. I’ll keep them handy to pull out while the boys are sitting through Arianna’s ballet lessons or I’m at Bible study.

Here’s what we worked on this week:

Bible

Image result for the god puzzle ackerman Ian has been going through The God Puzzle by Valerie Ackermann, and now that we’re a couple months into it, I’m starting to appreciate it for more than face value. This was a last minute curriculum decision (as in we were like a day out from starting school and I realized I only had Bible plans for Elijah so I went to my shelves to see what I could find for Ian), and at first I really wasn’t sure if he was getting anything out of it. He’s a reluctant writer, so he doesn’t give me much on the open-ended questions. Still, the “Talk About Sections” have given me some good insight into his theological understanding, and lately he’s been eager to get out his book to go through it. I think it’s a good fit for him, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the year goes.

As far as Elijah, he has been racing through the Veritas Press Self-Paced Course on Genesis – Joshua so quickly, I actually told him to take this week off. My plan was to have him finish this course by Christmas break so he could do the next course in the second half of the year, but I think he’s probably going to finish earlier than that.

Math

Both boys are doing their math almost completely independently, with daily fact practice on XtraMath.org, and 4-5 lessons a week in Teaching Textbooks 4. (I have the whole book scheduled over the course of the year, and I try not to have them do anything on days we have CC unless we’re behind.)

Writing/Spelling

We finished up Lesson 2 in All Things Fun and Fascinating from IEW, as well as Week 7 in Fix It! Grammar: The Nose Tree (Book 1). Ian is gaining a lot of confidence as he proceeds through Sequential Spelling, and I’m breathing a sigh of relief at having finally found something that is really helping him start to improve.

History

This week we didn’t have a chapter in The Light and the Glory for Children scheduled because I wanted to watch the Liberty’s Kids episodes that correspond with what we’vealready read (episodes #2-4: “Intolerable Acts,” “United We Stand,” and “Liberty or Death”). learn-our-history-jpg Instead, I planned other short readings from various older books I’d gotten with the e-book bundle from Yesterday’s Classics. We read about Patrick Henry, as well as two short stories about children in the days just before the Revolutionary War. We also watched the another DVD, Learn Our History: The Birth of a Revolution.

t for now I’m going to try to stick with our schedule to let these history stories really sink in. Thankfully, I found one more cute video to show them that drove the story a little more into their heads: Pups of Liberty: The Boston Tea-Bone Party on Izzit.org. (I don’t know if you have to be a member to watch the streaming video, but membership is free, and you can get one free DVD a year, plus free streaming of other videos, so we signed up last year and they just happened to email me about this video on Thursday so it was perfect timing!)

Miscellaneous

We didn’t read a biography this week, but we did watch the Torchlighters DVD on John Bunyan (both the animated feature and the documentary). It was a little late to go along with our history timeline, but I’m still glad we squeezed it in this week. Our read aloud book was also a little behind where we are in history, but the boys really enjoyed Newbery Medal winner The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds, which is based on the true story of a boy who bravely helps his mother protect their family against an Indian attack back in 1756.