His Treasure Seekers

In my original schedule, this was going to be a week off, but several fun opportunities came up last week that made me give the boys a few days off and allow them to finish up their work as they were able.  So we took advantage of homeschooling flexibility and spread a week’s worth of work over two weeks.

Preschool

Arianna spent every morning last week at “Royal Dance Camp,” so I didn’t do any planned preschool activities at home.  And this week all the little ones have been having a fantastic time just playing, so I didn’t feel it was necessary to pull them away from that to do anything else.  Some of their favorite activities this week were:

• sand and water tables
• poker chips (sorting by color, making patterns, etc.)
• colored dominoes (sorting by color, building, setting up domino runs)
• geoboards with rubber bands
• “rainbow stones” (glass vase fillers)
• mosaic tiles

For a more extensive list of preschool activities, check out “Entertaining Elijah (tips for toddlers).”

Elementary

I felt a little guilty as I planned this week because I had lots of videos scheduled to go along what we were studying.  However, Ian ended up getting sick, and I was thankful to have something quality to watch that also helped us get through my lesson plans on those days when he wasn’t up to much besides lying on the couch.

History

We read four chapters in The Light and the Glory for Children, finishing the settlement at Jamestown, moving onto the Separatists who started Plymouth Plantation (a.k.a. the Pilgrims), and then beginning learning about the Puritan settlers who followed a few years later.

We’ve studied the Pilgrims quite a bit during Thanksgiving time over the last few years, but Ian was more than happy to revisit his favorite books and movies.  We pulled out all of Kate Waters’ books about children in Pilgrim times (all with beautiful color photographs of people in period clothing):

• On the Mayflower
• Samuel Eaton’s Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Boy
• Sarah Morton’s Day : A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Girl
• Tapenum’s Day: A Wampanoag Indian Boy in Pilgrim Times

As I said, Ian watched several videos related to our history lessons:

• Colonial Life for Children: Jamestown
• William Bradford (from the Inspiring Animated Heroes series)
• “The Mayflower Voyagers” (part of the This is America, Charlie Brown series)
• Colonial Life for Children: Plimouth Plantation
• “A Journey to the New World” (Dear America Season 1, Episode 2)
• Colonial Life for Children: Roger Williams and Rhode Island (discussed in Chapter 8 of The Light and the Glory for Children

Biography

Since we stretched this “week” of school over two weeks, we actually focused on two different people, both Olympic athletes.

Gabby Douglas

As we looked forward to the Olympics starting, we focused on Gabby Douglas, who won the gold medal in the individual all-around for women’s gymnastics (as well as a team gold medal) at the 2012 London Olympics.  Her book, Raising the Bar has lots of information about her childhood, training, faith, and inspiration.  After reading it, we watched The Gabby Douglas Story, as well as several video clips from various competitions.  Then we had so much fun watching Gabby and the other members of the “Final Five” win the gold medal in the team final in Rio!

Eric Liddell

Then this week we went back in time to meet an athlete from the 1924 Olympics in Paris.  Eric Liddell is most famous for choosing to honor God by not running the race he had trained for because it was going to be held on a Sunday.  There is much more to his story, however, and we enjoyed learning about his work as a missionary in China as well.  We read two books, Eric Liddell: Running For a Higher Prize (Heroes for Young Readers) and Eric Liddell: Are You Ready? (Little Lights), and watched the Torchlighters: The Eric Liddell Story DVD (both the animated feature, and the documentary featuring his daughter and the author of Eric Liddell: Pure Gold, which I read a few years ago and pulled out for the boys so they could look at the photographs).  I didn’t think even Ian would want to sit through Chariots of Fire, so I enjoyed that one by myself.

Writing

Ian finished up all the lessons in Read Write & Type this week, and I’ve been impressed with how well his typing skills have been developing.  He’s also benefited from the emphasis on spelling rules, so I decided to get him a subscription for the “sequel” from Talking Fingers, Wordy Qwerty.  That way he has something “fun” to go along with the spelling activities he’s doing in Essential Skills Advantage.

I have the boys spend time on each program twice a week.  Both of these were programs we were given to review that have proven to be really helpful for our family.  I’ll have to see what Ian thinks of Wordy Qwerty before I decide whether or not to get Elijah a subscription as well.  He doesn’t need the spelling practice quite so much, but he still has several lessons to go on Read Write & Type so I’ve got time to make that decision.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks (may contain affiliate links):

• Foreign Language For Kids By Kids (Spanish)
• Solar System “FlipStir” puzzle from Enlivenze
• Exploring Creation with Astronomy, 2nd Edition from Apologia
• CHSH-Teach.comll

Coming back to school this week was a little challenging.  We’d just come back into town on Sunday, and between unpacking, laundry, and all the other chaos that follows a vacation, I ended up staying up far too late getting ready for this week.  I know I could have just taken a day or two off, but I felt like we could handle it.  And we would have, if we hadn’t taken time off for a family birthday and a play day with cousins from out of town.  So we pressed through.  And actually, we got a lot done, considering.

Preschool

As a follow up to last week’s camping adventure, I printed out several pages from the Camping Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations and put them in plastic sheet protectors for Arianna and Nico to work on with dry erase markers.  They both loved having “schoolwork” to do, and I’m glad my printer issues before vacation prevented me from taking these pages along with us, because they were the perfect easy activity to give my little ones this week.  There were pages that were simple enough for Nico to do, as well as some that challenged Arianna a bit, so it was a great fit.

  

That pack also went well with We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, which I pulled out of our Before Five in a Row collection and enjoyed reading it with them several times throughout the week.  They loved the repetition of this story, as well as doing hand motions with me through each stage.  I also had several activities printed, laminated, and all ready to go in a file folder from when I rowed Bear Hunt with the older boys.

  

Elementary

History

We didn’t officially do a biography this week because my plan this year is to use the read biographies for three weeks each month and then write a paper about one of them in the fourth week.  However, I decided to read Pocahontas by Ingrid and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire since it went along with the topic of Jamestown, which was what we read about in Chapter 4 of The Light and the Glory for Children. While I read, the kids did a Pocahontas coloring page and a maze from the Jamestown Rediscovery website.  We also watch a couple movies on Pocahontas (though not the Disney version this time):

• Animated Hero Classics: Pocahontas
• Pocahontas: Indian Princess (too much focus on the fictional romance between Pocahontas and John Smith for my taste, but definitely showed the discord between the men settling Jamestown)

My main goal for history this week was for the boys to remember Jamestown as the first (somewhat) successful English colony in the New World.  To help get that in their heads, we also read A Lion to Guard Us by Clyde Robert Bulla, about three English children who go to Jamestown to find their father after their mother dies.  The boys could probably have read this on their own, but I enjoyed reading it aloud to to them.

Writing

As I said, my plan this year is to have the boys create outlines throughout the month and then choose one from which to write during the last week.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get off to a great start with that in July, and they each only had one outline so they both had to write about Columbus.  Still, I’m glad they had at least one, and it was good to get back to following the structure they had learned in their IEW class last year.

This year I want them to stretch a little bit more, so I made them do more of the actual writing.  (Last year I just let them dictate to me and I typed it up for them).  The boys wrote out their rough drafts (though I helped Elijah with the end of his since it was a lot of writing for a 6-year old), then I wrote in changes as we went through their checklists, and then they both typed up their final drafts, which was a great learning experience in and of itself as they had to learn how to double space a document, center text for the title, and use spell-check.

Science

I wasn’t planning to do any formal science this year, but we were asked to review the new addition of Exploring Creation with Astronomy from Apologia, so we dived into that this week.  We had already covered the first five lessons when we did this curriculum before, so we spent most of this week reviewing by listening to the audiobook in the car, though we couldn’t resist jumping into Lesson 6 as well because the boys were really excited about starting their beautiful new notebooking journals.

In addition to all this, the boys kept up their independent work in Bible, math, spelling, and grammar, but there wasn’t much worth noting there except to say that I like Fix It! Grammar more and more each week.  It introduces concepts so gently (this week they learned about quotations) and gives the students a chance to practice them in context.   It’s just enough for me to feel like they’re getting some systematic instruction without overwhelming them with worksheets.  I’m really glad we gave it a try!

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks (may contain affiliate links):

• CTCMath.com
• Talking Shapes
• Foreign Language For Kids By Kids (Spanish)
• Solar System “FlipStir” puzzle from Enlivenze
• Exploring Creation with Astronomy, 2nd Edition from Apologia
• CHSH-Teach.com

 Our first week of school for 2016-17 was a success!  Things feel really different this year, and I’m not sure what the main factor is.  Part of it is just the kids getting older and being capable of more.  Part of it is having more kids actually doing school work (mostly just Ian and Elijah, but I’m also trying to do a little with Arianna).  Then there’s the fact that we’re going to be starting up Classical Conversations next month.  I also feel like I’ve done more planning than usual and have a clearer idea of what I want to cover this year.  All of these things combined to make school seem new and fresh, and while that’s a great thing, I was also a little uncertain as to how things were going to go this week.

The biggest change I made was creating a daily schedule.  In the past I have just had a list of what I wanted to get through each day, and I allowed Ian some flexibility in how we got through that list.  But now I have four kids needing time on our main computer (more on that in a minute), plus three kids who need to practice the piano, and without scheduling who was going to do what when, it just wasn’t going to happen.  So here’s I came up with for the four older kids and myself (downloadable doc you can adapt):

The only part of this I didn’t make happen this week was getting the boys to stop and read quietly for half an hour in the afternoon.  Because our neighbors are out wanting to play, my kids want to get through their work as quickly as possible, and since they’ve been choosing to read a lot in the evenings to earn prizes in our library’s summer reading program, I’m not going to enforce this right now.  If their reading habit continues, I’ll cut that out of the schedule permanently and just let it happen naturally.

Okay, so once that structure was put in place, getting through the things I had planned went fairly smoothly!

Preschool

Arianna will be turning 5 in the fall, missing the cut off for starting Kindergarten in California.  Yet she’s eager to learn and wants to have some school work to do alongside her older brothers.  So I’ve made time during our mornings to make sure she and Nico both get some sort of “preschool” experience.  I’m trying to read to them each day and give them some fun preschool activities like I did back in the early days of this blog when Ian was little.  I already shared about the fun we had this week with the Corduroy books, so I’ll leave it at that.

Most of Arianna’s “academic needs” are met during the half-hour of computer time I’ve given each of her, which she spends on Reading Eggs, Math Seeds, and More.Starfall.com (all subscriptions that I have found to be well worth the cost).

  She also started trying out Talking Shapes, on which I’ll be writing a review in a few weeks.

Nico loves watching Arianna on the computer as well as playing the same things himself.  He’s not quite 3, so his progress on Reading Eggs and Math Seeds is slow, but he enjoys playing the games over and over, so I’m happy to let him have his turn on the computer as well.  (We don’t have an iPad, but our computer has a touch screen, so he’s able to use it without needing to figure out a mouse.)

Then because Arianna wants to start writing, I also have her doing a little bit of copywork (10-15 minutes max each day) to make sure she’s learning how to form letters correctly.

Elementary

Like many homeschoolers, I have found that grade levels don’t mean a whole lot when it comes to meeting my kids’ needs.  Ian (8) is officially a 3rd grader this year, and since Elijah (6) can keep up with academically in almost everything (the exception being how much writing he can handle), I’ve decided to just have them do most of the same work this year, even though we’re calling Eli a 1st grader most of the time.

Bible

This is the one subject where the boys are taking different paths.  Ian started The God Puzzle by Valerie Ackermann, a workbook focused on how the Bible all fits together as one seamless story.  It has 36 lessons, each broken up into several sections.  This week I walked through Lesson 1 with Ian, but I’m hoping that once he gets more familiar with it, he’ll be able to do most of it on his own.  He liked the last assignment, “Talk to God about it,” because I sent him outside and told him he had a half-hour of quiet time to pray and journal about it on his own.

Elijah continued going through his Veritas Press Self-Paced Course on Genesis – Joshua, learning about the Call of Abram.  He really enjoys these lessons, both the content and the fact that he can do them all on his own.  During family Bible time in the evening he loves sharing with Daddy about things he’s been learning.

Math

They both got off to a good start in Teaching Textbooks 4, as well as jumping back into fact practice on XtraMath.org.  I also had them go through some tests on CTCMath to assess their strengths and weaknesses.  For the most part, though, they are both getting their math done independently.

History

We’re starting American history this year, using The Light and the Glory for Children: Discovering God’s Plan for America from Christopher Columbus to George Washington by Peter Marshall and David Manual as a “spine.”  This week we read the first two chapters, which talked about Christopher Columbus.  I like the way he was presented in a balanced way.  Too often I’ve seen him portrayed as either a benevolent hero or as a a typical evil white man bringing nothing but misery to the native people living in the New World.  Marshall and Manual talked about how at first Columbus wrote about his desire to spread the gospel, but also about how pride and greed tarnished his legacy in the end.

Along with our reading, the boys watched an  interactive map of Columbus’ journey online, marked the journey on a map (I used one from the YWAM unit study on Columbus we reviewed last year), and watched several videos afterward, which provided some good material for discussion.

• Columbus and the Great Discovery from Learn Our History (24:49, my kids love this series)
• Vintage Cartoon Introduction (5:29, politically incorrect, perpetuates some of the myths about Columbus, but still had some good information)
• “Christopher Columbus: What Really Happened?” (5:39, focuses on the negative things Columbus did, while acknowledging the importance of his role in connecting the Old World with the New World; provided good balance to the previous video)

Biography

This year I want to read lots of inspirational biographies with my kids, so we started off with Adoniram Judson: A Grand Purpose from YWAM Publishing’s “Heroes for Young Readers” series.  Judson and his wife were the first American missionaries overseas.  The book covered his early years when he doubted God’s goodness after his sister died, then talked about how he came back to God and ended up going to Burma, where he translated the Bible and helped spread the gospel in spite of governmental opposition.

We did most of the activities in the Heroes for Young Readers Activity Guide for Books 9-12, which has coloring pages, games, songs, and puzzles to go along with these books in the series.  The kids also enjoyed looking at pictures from my own trip to Burma/Myanmar several years ago.

Writing

Spelling is something Ian needs to practice continually, and I’ve found that he needs to get that practice in a fun way or else the time we spend on it is pretty much worthless.  For now, I’ve got both boys using both Read Write & Type and the spelling activities in Essential Skills Advantage, alternating between the two each day just to keep things from getting old.  We reviewed both of these programs over the last few months, and they give Ian the repetition he needs while still feeling like he’s “playing” on the computer.  Elijah doesn’t necessarily need the same amount of practice, but I figure it can’t hurt to have him doing the same lessons.

We haven’t done much in the way of grammar up to this point, so this year we’re trying out Fix It! Grammar: The Nose Tree (Book 1) from IEW.  There’s a little bit of teaching to do on the first day of the week, but then it just took a couple minutes for the boys to mark nouns and choose the correct ending punctuation before copying each day’s sentence into a composition book.  They also learned about the homophones there/their/they’re and had to choose the correct one in a couple of the sentences.

The boys learned so much in their writing class last year, and I wanted to keep those skills fresh in their minds while not putting quite such a heavy workload on them.  What I’ve decided to do is have them make an outline each week based on something we read about.  Then at the end of the month, they can choose from those outlines to write a paper.  We’re starting with just one paragraph, and as they get better at it we’ll expand on that.  This week they helped me write up two outlines (on Christopher Columbus and Adoniram Judson) and then they got to choose which one to copy and keep in their notebook for later.

Spanish

We just got a new program to review, Foreign Language For Kids By Kids, so we went through the first few lessons.  All four kids enjoyed watching the videos (some of it was review for the older boys), they participated in the activities as they were able, and then Ian is going through workbook that goes along with the program.

And that was our first week!  We packed a lot into the four days after 4th of July, but I’m thankful for a smooth start, good attitudes, and excitement about what else we’ll be learning this year.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks (may contain affiliate links):

• Beric the Briton (audio drama from Heirloom Audio)
• CTCMath.com
• Talking Shapes
• Foreign Language For Kids By Kids (Spanish)
• Solar System “FlipStir” puzzle from Enlivenze