Wrapping Up Week 9 (2016-17)
Here’s what we worked on this week:
Bible
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”). 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.
Upcoming Reviews
We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks (may contain affiliate links):
- KidsEmail.org
- The Pray-ers / Book 1 Troubles by Mark S. Mirza
- The Cat of Bubastes from Heirloom Audio Productions
- If You Were Me and Lived in…Colonial America (An Introduction to Civilizations Throughout Time) (Volume 4) and others in this series by Carole P. Roman
- Elementary Spanish 2 for grades 3-5 from Middlebury Interactive Language