His Treasure Seekers

 

The emotional and physical toll of my miscarriage affected our whole week, especially when it came to school.  We limped through and did manage to do something every day, but never even touched on our Bible lessons outside of family devotions in the evening.  (What?  Whatever happened to Bible first?  What sort of priorities does that show?  Believe me, I needed a lot of grace for myself.)  The week flew by quickly, however, and here’s what we did.

Math

Math is the one subject I tend to stress about getting behind in, mostly because we started Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme a few weeks after all our other subjects for first grade.  Last year I had taken some time off from Year 1 when Ian was struggling, which meant we ended working on it all the way through our summer break and then into the first few weeks of this year.  I’d really like to finish up Year 2 when we finish the rest of our school year, but that means we don’t have a lot of wiggle room.

This week Ian got through lessons 46-50.  As I’ve said in the past few weeks, he’s starting to get frustrated by some of the concepts we’re working on, primarily adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers.  To help him visualize the numbers he’s working with I tried having him use math blocks this week.  It was really helpful for adding 10’s and 1’s, and I think we’ll keep using these until he’s better able to keep the place values straight in his mind.

Literature/Ambleside Online

We started term two of Ambleside Online, Year 1, which meant new poetry selections.  This term we’re reading the poems of A. A. Milne. We started through When We Were Very Young this week, and if we have time in the next few months we’ll move onto Now We Are Six.  (If we don’t get through both books during this term, I think I’ll save it for summertime because I don’t want to rush through these delightful poems.)  I’ve owned copies of these books since my childhood, but I’ve only ever read a few scattered poems over the years.  I really enjoyed getting into them this week, and they’re especially fun for my boys because the poems occasionally mention Christopher Robin.

History Cycle

This week for our study of ancient Greece we continued to read through Our Little Athenian Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles.  One day while I read, Ian worked through the drawing instructions for the Parthenon from Draw and Write Through History: Greece and Rome and added that to his history notebook.

Science

We finished up The World of Animals this week, reading about microscopic creatures like protists and bacteria, (which aren’t really considered animals, but neither are they plants, so this was as good a time as any to talk about them).  It was a great week for getting out our microscope to look at both prepared slides and homemade ones with water from the stream at our local park.

Ian made a picture of a paramecium for his science notebook (although my fuzzy brain couldn’t remember where I had put my yarn, so he just drew the cilia rather than cutting little pieces of yarn as the book suggested).

Extras

This was our last week reviewing Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2), so Ian completed a few more lessons.  He has really enjoyed this program, so I intend to finish the rest of the units in the semester he’s working on before we go back to our Salsa lessons for Spanish.

We took school pictures one morning this week, and since that spoiled our regular schedule for the day I decided to take the kids to our local Children’s Museum.  They’ve been begging to go back, and everyone enjoyed the current exhibit on space (as well as all our other favorite permanent exhibits).

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)
• Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls from New Liberty Videos
• The Legend of St. Nicholas by Dandi Daley Mackall

This week looked a bit different for us than previous weeks.  In addition to some planned changes, we ended up having several family matters that needed my attention, so things were rather irregular. (In other words we watched a lot of videos and didn’t manage to do any notebooking.)  Here’s what we did manage to spend time on this week:

Bible

Somehow I forgot to take out my lesson plans for Bible Road Trip before the week started, and then when life happened I never got around to it.  We read a couple stories from Matthew in 365 Great Bible Stories at the beginning of the week, but then our only other morning Bible time was watching Built Upon the Rock (from Nest Entertainment’s Animated Stories from the New Testament).

Math

Ian got through lessons 41-45 of Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2) this week, but it wasn’t as easy for him as the previous lessons have been.  Adding whole tens went fine, but now that he’s adding double digits including 5’s he’s having to think a bit more, which I’ve noticed affects his entire attitude.  When everything is easy, he flies through the lessons, but as soon as just one part starts feeling challenging, he gets frustrated and starts to shut down.  He has trouble focusing even on the easy parts, and it takes a lot longer to get through math each day.

Literature/Ambleside Online

This week we finished our first term of Ambleside Online, Year 1!  I’ve been drooling over the AO curriculum for years, so it feels really good to have finally accomplished some of it!  We’ve enjoyed all the reading, though Ian definitely had some favorites.  We didn’t quite finish all the poems in A Child’s Garden of Verses, but we’re going to put in back on the shelf and move onto next term’s poetry selection anyway.

History Cycle

History is where I made the biggest intentional changes to the way we’ve been doing school.  Mystery of History and Story of the World both go through history using a series of separate stories, but I wanted to try a slightly different approach for a while.  Rather than discussing specific episodes in history, I want to help Ian develop a sense of the era.

So this week we began our study of Ancient Greece by reading Our Little Athenian Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles, a classic novel about two boys in Athens.  (It’s part of the original e-book bundle from Yesterday’s Classics.)  Ian enjoyed it, asking for me to read more each day when I’d reached the end of a chapter.  We talked about the Parthenon, the statue of Athena, and a bit about Greek culture.  It also introduced him to some of the characters in Greek mythology, and I plan to read a few myths to him once we finish (hopefully next week).

We also watched 2 Episodes of Drive Thru History: “Ancient History: Greece” and “Ancient History: Athens and Paul” (also available through the TBN Roku channel).

Science

For some reason when I wrote out our schedule of science lessons for the year I didn’t have us finishing up our first of the three books in God’s Design for Life until next week, even though this is officially the end of our first term.  This week we read through lessons 29-31 in The World of Animals.  Because of our circumstances this week we weren’t able to do any extra projects, but the kids did enjoy watching Wild Kratts Season 1, Episode 5 “Mystery of the Squirmy Wormy.”

Extras

Ian did several more lessons in Middlebury Interactive Languages, and I was really thankful that he was able to do them independently, because otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten to Spanish at all this week.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Old Testament iWitness, New Testament iWitness, and iWitness Biblical Archeology by Doug Powell (from Apologia)
• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)
• Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls from New Liberty Videos
• The Legend of St. Nicholas by Dandi Daley Mackall

Between a week of sickness, a week of prepping for vacation, and then being gone, we had fallen behind on some schoolwork and lost our rhythm, so this week my main goal was to get caught up and back into our routine.  It made for a full week!

Bible

We finally got back into Bible Road Trip: Year Three, picking up with the second week of lessons on Matthew.  I leaned more heavily on the Preschool/Kindergarten assignments this week so I could include the little ones in our morning Bible lesson.  I think it’s a good fit, but I’d like to integrate a bit more of the “Researching the Word” from the Lower Grammar lessons with Ian, so we’ll still play around with it a bit. (This is the main reason I prefer to use a free curriculum whenever possible–I ALWAYS end up tweaking it at least a little, and I’d feel really irritated if I had paid a lot of money for someone else’s plans only to change them!)

It’s been really good have the little ones join us in the mornings as part of what we’ve been inclusively calling “worship” (the first part of our couch time/circle time/whatever we’re going to end up naming it).  Before Nicholas goes down for his morning nap, we all gather around the piano to sing a combination of hymns, worship songs from church, and fun kids’ praise songs.  Ian likes to get out his guitar and strum along (even though he only knows 4 chords and can’t change his fingering fast enough to keep up yet), and sometimes some of them dance.  When we first started everyone seemed a little reluctant to drop what they were doing to join me in the living room, but now they all look forward to it, and on the rare morning that we skip it for some reason I hear about it!

After singing, I put Nicholas to bed and we read one of the scheduled stories in 365 Great Bible Stories (according to the BRT lesson plan).   These are pretty short, and sometimes I’ll read more than one if I still have everyone’s attention.

One thing I’m not as consistent about but I’m working on is praying togeher after this.  As I was reading through Circle Time by Kendra Fletcher (of Preschoolers and Peace) I liked her suggestions of praying through the ACTS model together (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication).  I’d like to work toward that, but I think it’s a bit too much of a stretch for my kids right now.  I chose to focus this week on just the A and S.  We went around and each of us came up with a word to praise God: “God you are [patient, kind, loving, merciful, etc.].”  Then I told them to think of one thing they wanted God to help them with that day, whether with schoolwork, attitudes, relationships, or anything else they could think of.

The first day I realized that God had answered those prayers for each one of us, and I pointed it out to the boys that night during Bible time.  It was really neat to see what a difference it had made in our days, and I want to make sure I remember to include prayer time each morning before Arianna’s attention span reaches its limit, and I let her wander off.

After prayer the older boys go through memory verses with me.  (We use the Scripture Memory System from Simply Charlotte Mason, which is great for reviewing verses we’ve already learned as well as practicing new ones.)  This is new to Elijah, but he’s starting to pick up several of the verses Ian has already learned, and it’s helping Ian learn new ones more quickly having someone else there.  (Right now we’re working on the Beatitudes).

Our lessons from BRT tied right in with our evening devotions in Old Story New this week, and I’m really pleased with how well they are complementing each other.  By the time we read with Daddy in the evening, the boys have heard the story and talked about it with me, so they’re much quicker to answer questions and get more about of our time with him.  I think the repetition is really good for them.

The last thing we do before moving on to other subjects is read from Prudence and the Millers, which Ian still really enjoys.  Almost every day he begs me to read an extra chapter, but I’m trying to stretch it out.

Math

Every day Ian has been asking God to help him get through his math quickly and easily, and things have never gone so smoothly for us.  This week he finished lessons 36-40 in Year 2 of MEP, and he did more independently than he’s ever been able (or willing) to try in the past.  It’s so great to see him enjoying a subject that he struggled with for a while.

Elijah also joined us for math this week.  He loves numbers, and he’s started asking to do math almost every day when he sees Ian settling down to work.  I’ve slowly been starting to go through MEP Year 1 with him, but this week it became obvious we’re going to pick up the pace a bit.

With MEP it’s usually really important to go through the activities in the lesson plans, and I’ve found that especially true with Ian.  With Elijah right now, however, most of what’s covered in the lesson plans is already really easy for him.  I’m focusing more on the practice book pages just so he can get used to the way concepts are presented there.  Eventually I’m sure I’ll need to do the complete lessons, and I’m hoping it doesn’t make our mornings drag out too much.

Actually, since he’s been happily completing more than one page per day, I may try to help him catch up with Ian by next year so I can just have them working at the same level.  (I wouldn’t try accelerating any of the other children so quickly, but Elijah is definitely gifted in math, so I think it might end up being a good option for our family.)  I told him he doesn’t have to do any schoolwork until after he turns 5 next month, but most days he begs to do math (both during our normal school time and then in the later afternoon as well!)

Literature/Ambleside Online

The main place we had fallen behind over the last few weeks was in our Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading, and it felt good to get almost all the way caught up.  I’ve decided to drop the Burgess Bird Book unless Ian asks for it or we have a little extra time.  I don’t know enough about the birds in our area to choose chapters relevant to us, and since we’re doing a lot outside of AO, I wanted to cut some of what I consider lower priority books.

One of our favorite things this week was reading about William Tell in Fifty Famous Stories Retold. I had found a couple related audio dramas from ArtsReformation.com, and Ian really enjoyed the one from Mercury Storyteller (part of “St. George and the Dragon & William Tell“).  I preferred “William Tell” from Tale Spinners for Children because it incorporated music from the familiar William Tell Overture, but it was a little too long for Ian.

History Cycle

I’ve said several times over the last few weeks that I’m moving away from using Mystery of History, Vol.1, and this week I made that official by actually erasing the chapter titles from my lesson plan book for the rest of the year.  I just want to focus less on biblical history (which we cover in depth in our Bible lessons) and more on other ancient civilizations this year.  I think I’m going to turn to Story of the World, Vol. 1 by Susan Wise Bauer to be our “spine” (at least I’ve written those chapters into my book), but we’ll see how it goes.

I really wanted to start getting into the Greeks, so this week after touching on the division of Israel after Solomon’s death, we started Greek history with the story of the Trojan horse. (Chronologically they should have been in reverse order, but I wanted a clean start to our study of Ancient Greece.)

Israel Divided

To cover the division of the kingdom, we used the Day By Day Kid’s Bible by Karen Henley.  First I read “Enemies” about King Solomon turning away from God and Ahijah’s message to Jeroboam (pages 269-270), and then Ian read aloud “One Nation Turns into Two Nations” (pages 271-272) about Solomon’s son Rehoboam’s foolish decision that drove ten tribes to reject him as their King and form the new northern kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam.

I don’t often have Ian do reading assignments, but I’d like to start trying to having him take some on, even if he’s still just reading to me.  Eventually I’ll work toward having him read independently and then come and narrate to me.

For his history notebook, he used this page from biblestoryprintables.com.

Trojan Horse

I read the account of the legend of the Trojan Horse in A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer (Chapter 11: “A Fairy-Tale War”).  Ambleside Online uses this book starting in Year 2, so I wanted to get a feel for it, and I’ll probably use it fairly regularly this year whenever it lines up with the topics in Story of the World, Vol. 1.  Once again, biblestoryprintables.com had a quick, eye-catching page for Ian’s notebook.

Science

Science was the other place I felt really behind, but we managed to get through lessons 24-28 in The World of Animals (covering arachnids, crustaceans, myriapods, mollusks, and cnidarians).  A lot of these animals live in the ocean, so it fit in well with Finding Nemo, which we watched the last night of our vacation.  (As we read about jellyfish and how their tentacles sting most animals but not clownfish, Ian looked at me in exasperation and said, “Mom!  I already know that!”  I bet he didn’t before the movie though!)

We didn’t get to do a lot of extras for these lessons because we were rushing through them, but Ian did make a couple arachnid models according to the directions in the book (which, thankfully, were easy enough for him to read and follow all on his own).  He really wanted to do more models (the next lesson had instructions for making one with clay), but I wasn’t up to the mess.  (Just being honest!)

We watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Animal Locomotion and read several related books together:

    Ian also really wanted me to read The Life Cycle of a Spider by Bobbie Kalman, but I didn’t want to pack too much more into our mornings.  (I always try to finish up our schoolwork by 12:30.)  He did read part of the book on his own, picking it up several times throughout the week.  I really like this series, and I’m glad to have them as part of our family library so Ian can go through them on his own.

Extras

We’re still enjoying going through the K-2 Spanish course from Middlebury Interactive Languages.  This week Ian was working on Unit 3 on Family.  Some of this was review for him, but it’s presented very differently than the lessons we’ve done with Salsa, so I think it’s still really good for him.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Old Testament iWitness, New Testament iWitness, and iWitness Biblical Archeology by Doug Powell (from Apologia)
• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)
• Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls from New Liberty Videos
• If He Had Not Come retold by David Nicholson

This was a crazy week.  We missed a lot last week due to me being sick, so part of me wanted to do a ton of work this week to get caught up.  However, I was still recovering, and laryngitis is not conducive to the kind of school we’ve been doing, with lots of reading aloud.  Plus we’re getting ready for our first official week off next week, so I didn’t necessarily want to start into anything new. Then throw in a school holiday for Nico’s first birthday, and this week was definitely a lesson in flexibility.

Bible

We had accomplished one week in Matthew (week 3 of Bible Road Trip: Year Three) before I got sick, and rather than start week 2 and then take another week off before getting into week 3, I decided to just forgo our BRT lessons this week. It worked out fine, since our evening devotions in Old Story New were covering the baptism of Jesus and kept us in Matthew.

In the mornings we spent some time reading about Jehoshaphat, since boys’ choir is rehearsing a musical about him.  Also, Ian was anxious to get back into Prudence and the Millers, but we only managed to get through one chapter this week.

Math

We’re spending a lot of time counting by 10’s and 5’s in lessons 31-35 in Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2).  Grandma taught the boys a song for counting by 10’s years ago, so all of the activities related to that came really easily to Ian.  He struggled a little more with the 5’s, but we’re practicing a lot, so he’s getting better.

One of his favorite ways to practice was tossing a beanbag back and forth.  Sometimes we just counted by 5’s, alternating between the two of us.  Other times I would say a number as I tossed it to him (something ending in 0 or 5), and then he would tell me 5 more (or less).  Of course the the other kids wanted in on this game, so we practiced with Elijah counting by 2’s, and the boys practiced with Arianna counting from 1 to 20.  Everyone got lots of number practice in this week (and some throwing/catching practice as well)!

Literature/Ambleside Online

This week I realized I was going to need to rely on some audiobooks in order to get caught up on our Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading.  Our book of Aesop’s Fables came with a CD, but it doesn’t have every story, so that didn’t work out as I had hoped.  However, I went to booksshouldbefree.com, and I downloaded mp3s for Just So Stories, the Red Fairy Book, and the King of the Golden River, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to catch up on some of our AO reading while on the road.

I also borrowed the Arkangel dramatic recording of The Tempest from the library, which I’m going to see if Ian can follow.  I remember listening to several Shakespeare recordings this way during a season when I had a long commute, and I really enjoyed them.  Ian loves listening to stories and audio dramas, so I’m hoping he’ll like this, even though we didn’t get a chance to read the shorter version of the story in Tales from Shakespeare (though maybe we can catch up on that after our break).

We finished the D’Aulaires’ Benjamin Franklin, which Ian really enjoyed.  Usually he chooses to build with blocks or other quiet toys while I read, but when we got to the part of about the Revolution, he decided to draw a picture of a battle.  After we finished the book, we watched the Animated Hero Classics DVD on Benjamin Franklin.  Ian was really disappointed in the movie.  There had been so many wonderful details about Franklin’s life in the D’Aulaires’ book, and he asked me, “What about the rest of it?”  I’m glad he liked the book so much, and I think it provided a great introduction to this fascinating historical figure.

Science

We skipped history altogether this week (aside from our AO reading), but I’m a little less flexible when it comes to science.  I really want to try to get through the entire God’s Design for Life series this year, so we read through lessons 20-23 in The World of Animals.  Ian was having a bit of a hard time classifying animals, so I drew a chart showing how there are bigger groups (vertebrates/invertebrates) and then smaller group (mammals/reptiles/etc.)  We’re just getting started on invertebrates, so we talked about what different groups of arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans) have in common, as well as what makes them distinct.

To help Ian understand the idea of an exoskeleton (and other features of an insect’s body), we built our own bug:

1. We blew up 3 small balloons and taped them together to represent the head, thorax, and abdomen.
2. Ian used flour and water paste with newspaper to cover the balloons and then set them in the sun to dry.
3. After the paper mache had dried, he cut up a pipe cleaner to make joined legs and antennae, taping them all to the proper parts of the body.

If we’d had more time this week I would have suggested he paint the body after step 2, but he didn’t seem to mind.  He did get tired of the paper mache after a while and I helped him finish that part, but other than that this was a project he was able to work on mostly independently.

Extras

The boys are both continuing to enjoy Ian’s lessons with Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2).  This week he finished Unit 1: Greetings and then worked all the way through Unit 2: Numbers.  Both of the boys are already familiar with number 1-10, but they really enjoyed getting to use what they knew to complete the activities quickly.

And now onto… our first “Sabbath” week

As a child, I remember getting to the end of July and feeling like I could handle going back to school.  I always wished I could save the rest of my vacation weeks to use throughout the school year when I really needed them.

Now that we get to set our own schedule, I’ve tried to spread out our weeks of rest rather than taking a long summer break.  We had a couple of odd weeks in August with baseball camp and music camp, so I put off our first Sabbath until now, but unlike during those camp, I intend to let Ian (and myself) fully rest from school.  When I drew up my calendar for this year and looked at when to schedule in our weeks off, it usually worked out to be about every 7th week or so after from this point on.  I’m hoping this rhythm will help us avoid getting burned out or frustrated.  See you in a couple weeks!

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Preschoolers and Peace: Homeschooling older kids with success while loving the little ones at your feet (e-book) by Kendra Fletcher
• Jesus (Get to Know series) by Nancy I. Sanders
• Old Testament iWitness, New Testament iWitness, and iWitness Biblical Archeology by Doug Powell (from Apologia)
• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)
• Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls from New Liberty Videos

“The greatest plans of mice and men sometimes go astray.”

I don’t know how great my plans were for this week, but what we actually did looked nothing like the notes I’d jotted down last Sunday.  I was just getting my fourth child through a nasty virus that had attacked all my offspring when I started feeling a sore throat coming on.  And with that, our week went down the drain.  We took one day off when my fever was raging, but the rest of the week I pushed myself to help get Ian through at least math and his Spelling You See work.  Then on Thursday I decided to spend some time focusing on 9/11, but that was it for school this week.  Luckily I’ve built some catch up weeks into our schedule, so I don’t think it’s really going to matter much.

Bible

The only Bible time we had this week was our family devotions in Old Story New, in which we talked about John the Baptist’s ministry.  I also had Ian do a worksheet on the Beatitudes to keep them fresh in his mind.

Math

I am so proud of Ian and how far he has come using Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2).  Last year we struggled through some rough parts and I was afraid this curriculum might be too challenging for him, but the beauty of the spiral approach is becoming evident, for he is developing strong thinking skills.  The growth has really been amazing, and I am thankful we stuck it out with MEP.

One night this week Ian was praying about the next day, and he talked to God about having fun with math.  His attitude has made our math lessons something to look forward to, because I love watching things “click” in his mind.  Twice this week we went through 2 lessons in one day, and he never complained, just zipped through them quickly.  It’s really an answer to prayer!

History

Because of my sickness, we took a break from our history cycle, but I did want to spend Thursday focusing on 9/11.

First, I wanted to introduce Ian to the World Trade Center so he would feel a connection to the towers before knowing what happened to them.  We watched part of Man on Wire, and then read along with a video of The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordecai Gerstein, about Philippe Petit, a Frenchman who strung a wire between the two towers and walked across it back in 1974.  The end of the book mentions, “Now the towers are gone,” which provided a good transition into what happened September 11, 2001.

Then we watched Learn Our History: 9/11 and the War on Terror, and because Ian still had some questions, we also watched some of the news footage from that morning, as well as part of The Day the Towers Fell.

Science

We didn’t read any of our lessons in The World of Animals, but while I was sick we did put on two episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy: Invertebrates and Spiders just to keep the subject in the front of Ian’s mind.

Extras

This week we began reviewing Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2), so we’re setting aside our regular Salsa lessons for a while.  We got off to a really good start with this program (“It’s like Reading Eggs for Spanish!” was Ian’s first remark), so I’m looking forward to the next few weeks with it.

This was also the first week of the boys’ music/drama classes.  Our Fridays are pretty much taken up with choir, handchimes, drama, and a couple other classes between the older kids.  Even Arianna got to be a part of one, and I think these classes are going to be my favorite thing about this year.  I watched the boys in their drama class getting up on stage, practicing how to stand with poise, project their voices, make eye contact, etc. and I was just so glad they have this opportunity.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Preschoolers and Peace: Homeschooling older kids with success while loving the little ones at your feet (e-book) by Kendra Fletcher
• Jesus (Get to Know series) by Nancy I. Sanders
• Old Testament iWitness, New Testament iWitness, and iWitness Biblical Archeology by Doug Powell (from Apologia)
• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)

Holidays always throw me for a loop when it comes to school.  I would rather take off days for family birthdays than things like Labor Day, but since Daddy had the day off, we didn’t want to do school as usual.  However, it worked out well this time, since he did go into work on Saturday, so we just shifted our 5-day school week back a day.

Bible

This week in Bible Road Trip: Year Three we started our actual book-by-book study of the New Testament with the first nine chapters of Matthew.  I’m having some trouble finding a good level of time to spend on these lessons.  The amount of reading in the Lower Grammar assignments is a bit much, even with us doing it together, but the preschool/Kindergarten lessons didn’t feel like enough.  (I did end up buying 365 Great Bible Stories, the storybook BRT uses with the younger children, and I do like it, but I felt like Ian needed a bit more “meat.”)

For now, I’m using the Bible storybook with all the children, and then reading shorter passages from the Lower Grammar assignments with Ian.  This week I chose to focus on the Beatitudes (in Matthew 5), and I think we’ll work on memorizing them during the three weeks we spend on Matthew.  To help with that, I made little laminated cards that we went through each morning, as well as letting all the kids do matching coloring pages.  Elijah and Arianna really liked being a part of our school time, so I think I’m going to try to keep including them in as much of our Bible lessons as they can handle.

 

Math

This week we worked on lessons 21-25 in Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme, which surprised me a little by introducing multiplication.  Ian understood it more quickly than he has other new concepts, and we found lots of opportunities to practice as we went about our days.  (“If you, Elijah, and Arianna each have 4 crackers, how could you say that as an addition?” “4+4+4=12,” “As a multiplication?” “3×4=12”)

Literature/Ambleside Online

So far I’ve been sticking pretty closely to the reading schedule for Ambleside Online, Year 1, but this week we couldn’t resist going a little further with Paddle-to-the-Sea.  Ian was fascinated by the description of the logs going through the sawmill, so I went searching for a video to show us more.  Nothing went as in depth as I would have liked, but he did enjoy one that we found.  We’re planning to watch the movie of Paddle-to-the-Sea once we finish the book, and I’m hoping it will show Ian what he wanted to see.

Ian was also really excited to start the D’Aulaires’ Benjamin Franklin.  I think we’ve talked a little about Franklin before, which is probably why Ian was so interested.  Now that we’re spending time talking about him, Ian’s noticing pictures of him and references that used to just slip by him.

History Cycle

This week we really moved away from following the lessons in Mystery of History, Vol.1. Rather than breaking history into specific “episodes,” I want to spend a little more time just focusing on more general topics.  This week we talked about the time the Israelites spent as slaves in Egypt, the Exodus, and the battle of Jericho.

I read the chapter entitled “The Wandering Jews” from A Child’s History of the World by V.M. Hillyer.  It was our first time reading from this book, which I had gotten to use later on with Ambleside Online.  It seemed like a good fit, though I did a little editing as we went since Hillyer names the pharaoh of the Exodus period as Ramses, which isn’t accepted as true by many Egyptologists.  Overall, however, Ian seemed to pay better attention when I read from this book than he has with some others, so I think we’ll probably use it when it fits in with what I want to cover.

For his history notebook, we used a couple pages from biblestoryprintables.com.  We talked through the ten plagues and numbered the pictures.  Then I had him tell me the story of the Exodus and I wrote down his words.  (I wanted him to focus more on getting the ideas out than on the task of writing.)

Most of what we talked about this week was review, so we just had fun with it.  The boys enjoyed revisiting some of their favorite DVDs: the Wars of Humanity combo pack and Jericho: The Promise Fulfilled from Shatterpoint Entertainment, which use LEGO-style bricks and stop motion animation to tell the very Bible stories we were focusing on.

Science

This week we focused on reptiles in lessons 16-19 in The World of Animals (from God’s Design for Life).  We read the “Beginners” lessons in the book and did an activity comparing a turtle’s flipper with a tortoise’s claw.

Ian also made a collage of various reptiles for his notebook, and we watched a couple videos: Bill Nye the Science Guy: Reptiles: and Wild Kratts Season 2, Episode 5 “Walk on the Wet Side” (about the Basilisk lizard).

Extras

For Spanish, we finished up our time with Salsa video 113 (the Three Billy Goats Gruff).  We’ll be taking a break from Salsa while we review a different Spanish program, but then we’ll jump back into the rest of this unit.

Art lessons have been few and far between this year.  We did manage to get to lesson 14 in ARTistic Pursuits K-3 Vol. 2: Stories of Artists and Their Art this week, but we didn’t do the project yet.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Preschoolers and Peace: Homeschooling older kids with success while loving the little ones at your feet (e-book) by Kendra Fletcher
• Jesus (Get to Know series) by Nancy I. Sanders
• Old Testament iWitness, New Testament iWitness, and iWitness Biblical Archeology by Doug Powell (from Apologia)
• Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2)

The last time we went to the library, we maxed out my card.  It was a first for us, but now that the boys are both really getting into reading, I could see it was going to be a recurring problem.  The solution?  Get Ian his own library card!  Ever since I mentioned the idea, he’s been begging to go back, so this week he was quite proud of his newest acquisition.  (Elijah won’t be old enough for a few more months, but he’s looking forward to getting his as well.)

Next week my boys will be spending their mornings at music camp, so I wanted to finish on a strong note this week.  I was thankful that we not only covered everything I had hoped to, we even got most of it done in four days, so we were able to take most of Friday off to go swimming and play with cousins!

Bible

We’re on week 2 of Bible Road Trip: Year Three, which was basically an introduction to the New Testament.  Some of the research portion of the lesson had to do with the history of the period after the Old Testament ended.  In addition to the assigned reading, we all watched The Maccabees: The Story of Hanakkuh and Ian colored one of the pages that goes along with the movie for his Bible notebook.

Our family devotions in Old Story New had us talking about the birth of Jesus, so we went into the Christmas closet and dug out the Little People nativity set.  We also watched the last couple scenes of The Nativity Story on DVD.  It was kind of fun having a taste Christmas in August!

We’re still reading just a few verses in Proverbs each morning (finished chapter 15 this week) and working our way through Prudence and the Millers (Chapters 11-14).  In addition to the reading, we usually try to discuss some of the pages in Prudence and Your Health, a workbook designed to go along with it.  For chapter 14 there was a fun game that all three older children enjoyed playing with me.  Wise choices allowed them to move forward, while foolish ones sent them backwards, sometimes all the way to the beginning!  It was the first time Arianna has joined us in this kind of game, and she thought it was great fun being a part of it all.

Math

I’m not always very good at finding ways to have fun with math, but this week that wasn’t a problem.  As we worked through lessons 16-20 in the Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2), we spent quite a bit of time with the “logic set,” (shape cards from MEP) which Ian always enjoys.  We play a game sort of like “Guess Who?”, where one of us picks a shape and the other asks yes or no questions until they figure out which one was picked.  I’ve been trying to teach Ian to think of questions that eliminate as many possibilities as he can in one turn:

• Is your shape black?
• Is it large?
• Does it have more than 3 sides?

He loves playing this game, and we always have to move on to something else before he is ready to stop.

The boys have also been begging Eric to play “The Allowance Game,” which is a fun way to sneak in some math practice.

Literature/Ambleside Online

In A Child’s Garden of Verses we read the poem “The Lamplighter.”  When I asked Ian if he knew what a lamplighter was, he surprised me with a very thorough answer.  I asked him how he knew so much about it, and he reminded me of a book I’d picked up from another homeschool family last year.  We found Peppe the Lamplighter on our shelf and added it to our reading for the week. It’s a charming story with beautiful illustrations (a Caldecott Honor-winning book) about an immigrant boy who takes delight in his work as a lamplighter, even though his father disapproves of the menial job at first.

In our Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading, we loved the story and message of “Cornelia’s Jewels” in Fifty Famous Stories.  Ian didn’t really get the point first, but I explained what it was about and then we reread the last part of the story.  He beamed when I pointed to the wall of pictures of our kids and told them, “Look at my jewels–I’m rich!”

History Cycle

This week we only covered one lesson from Mystery of History, Vol.1, and I realized that the only part I’m really using from MoH is the Table of Contents.  This volume spends so much time on biblical history, which I feel like we’ve already covered in depth.  I definitely want my children to know where biblical events fall in relation to other things we study in history, but I would rather save our precious school hours for things they’re not yet familiar with.

Ancient China (Shang Dynasty)

We read in Story of the World, Vol. 1 about how the ancient Chinese learned to harvest silk from silkworm cocoons and turn it into cloth.  We also read a bit from The Silk Route by John S. Major (just the map and the page on the history of silk in China).  It was a teaser for when we talk about the Silk Road in Year 2 of our history cycle.  Ian loved that the secret of how to make silk was kept for thousands of years.  For his history notebook he did a page from biblestoryprintables.com.

To help understand the process of making silk more, we watched this video from the Science Channel.  I like the style of it, but didn’t cover enough for my taste.

So then we watched “The Story of Silk,” which wasn’t as well narrated, but went through more of the process.

Science

Lessons 14-15 in The World of Animals (from God’s Design for Life) had us learning about amphibians.  For his notebook, Ian did a “Life Cycle of a Frog” worksheet I found online (which was a little more age-appropriate than the one included on the curriculum CD-ROM).  We read About Amphibians by Cathryn Sill and watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Amphibians (which contains a few evolutionary references we just discussed).  Ian really loves this show, and he’s always asking to do the experiments in the “Try This” segments.  They were really simple this time, so I was happy to be able to say yes for once.

The first experiment shows how amphibian skin works.  We filled a baby food jar with water and food coloring, then covered it with a paper towel held on by a rubber band.  We placed that jar in a larger jar filled with plain water.  Just as an amphibian’s porous skin lets water and oxygen pass in and out of its body, the dyed water was able to pass through the paper towel.

The other experiment was just a simple demonstration of how frogs croak, which Ian loved and repeated throughout the week.

Extras

For Spanish, we started the next unit in Salsa with episode #113.  We spend two weeks on each episode, and there are six in each unit.  All of us were excited about learning some new Spanish words as we began the series on the Three Billy Goats Gruff.  I was excited to hear Ian trying to put together phrases in Spanish in a totally different context using what he had learned during our lesson time.

We finally managed to squeeze in some art!  Ian had a great time creating a torn paper collage to go along with our lesson in ARTistic Pursuits K-3 Vol. 2: Stories of Artists and Their Art.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• King David (Get to Know series) by Nancy I. Sanders
• Preschoolers and Peace: Homeschooling older kids with success while loving the little ones at your feet (e-book) by Kendra Fletcher

We’ve fallen into a pretty good routine now that we’ve finished Week 5 of this school year.  Even when unexpected things come up, we’ve been able to get through most of what I want to finish in a week.  (And I’m learning what to let go, which is huge for me!)  Here’s a glimpse at the past week:

Bible

This week we officially began going through the New Testament. (Woohoo!) Each evening we’ll be going through chronological readings with the family in Old Story New, but Ian and I will also be using Bible Road Trip: Year Three as part of our schooling.  Up until now our time with BRT has only involved matching up weeks from Years One and Two with our family devotions and doing the research (and videos) that went along.  Now we’re adding a new component to our morning reading, since BRT will take us through the New Testament book by book.

I’m currently planning to use the Lower Grammar assignments with just Ian.  I’ve thought about doing the Preschool/Kindergarten level and including Elijah and Arianna, but we already have so many picture Bible storybooks, I didn’t really want to buy the one that goes along with BRT.  If the reading load is overwhelming for Ian, however, I may end up deciding to do that.

It would be nice to include everyone in our morning Bible time.  This week I started spending some time in worship with all the children before we started our school day, and it would be easy to add some Bible reading after that before letting the little ones go off to play.  I’d like to start encouraging them to stay with us for our devotional time (even if I don’t use the BRT Preschool materials).  This week we continued reading Prudence and the Millers (Chapters 7-10) and made it through Proverbs 15:1-20.

Since this was our first official week with BRT, Ian started his new Bible notebook.  If you’ve seen any of the Bible lessons I’ve posted over the last couple of years, you know we’ve done Bible notebook pages of some sort or another since he turned 3.  This year we’re stepping up to add a slightly more academic component rather than just fun crafts, but hopefully we’ll get some of those in it too.

This week Ian started writing the names of the books of the Bible on the Bible library bookshelf page I created a while back, as well as creating a page on the “Armor of God” to go along with one of our readings for Week 1 – “What is the Bible?”.  We did this craft a while back in our Armor of God unit using the picture of the boy given with the armor, but I thought this time it would be fun to use a picture of Ian himself and include text boxes with the passage we had read.  Of course, when the others saw his page, they wanted to do their own.

The boys were in their pajamas when I whipped the camera out, which at first Ian didn’t like, but it adds some fun color to their pages so we ended up just going with it.  After taking pictures of each kid, I opened them in Paint and selected around their bodies to delete the background (so I wouldn’t waste ink).  Then I pasted the images into a Word document so I could adjust what size they would be on the page.

Math

We got through lessons 11-15 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2).  So far Ian’s been very comfortable with it, not too challenged, and his confidence has really grown.  I’m impressed with how much he is able to do, especially considering how challenging parts of Year 1 were for him.  The only area I’m really keeping an eye on is how quick (or slow) he is with his math facts.  He’s made some improvement (and we’ve gotten in some extra practice with one of our reviews), but he could get through the practice book pages a lot faster if he knew them, and I could see him getting bogged down soon if MEP moves on and he’s still trying to count out sums for each part of the more complex problems.

Literature (Ambleside Online)

We caught up with our Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading this week, going back to A Child’s Garden of Verses for poetry and enjoying another story in James Herriot’s Treasury for Children.  I think that’s Ian’s favorite AO book so far, though he also really enjoys the Aesop’s fables.

History Cycle

This was the first week we’ve deviated from the schedule in Mystery of History, Vol.1, which spent an entire week (3 lessons) on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Since we’ve covered Old Testament history in depth already, I don’t feel a need to linger on the biblical stories in MoH.  Rather, I combined those lessons into one day of reviewing the Patriarchs, and then we moved on to Hammurabi.

Patriarchs

Since Ian already knows the stories of the Patriarchs, I wanted to focus more on the “big picture” and how they fit into the grand scheme of history.  After connecting Abraham to what we’ve read about Sumeria, we talked about his faith and the covenant God made with him.  It’s pretty amazing how this one man who lived thousands of years ago has helped shape the world for all of history ever since.

We talked about Abraham’s family line and how important it is to understanding history.  We made a family tree for Ian’s history notebook (with pasted pictures from the Homeschool In the Woods’ History Through the Ages-Collection CD with approximate dates) and read Ballad of Matthews Begats, a cute book which takes the reader through the family line from Abraham to Jesus.  (The words are even put to music in a fun song on the CD included with the book.)  At Ian’s request, we also revisited some of our favorite books and videos from the last time we studied Joseph.

Hammurabi

I read Ian the chapter about Hammurabi in Story of the World, Vol. 1 by Susan Wise Bauer.  We talked about some of his laws and discussed what was fair about them (or not).  I printed the free notebook page on Hammurabi from biblestoryprintables.com to go in the plastic page protector with the Hammurabi figure from Famous Figures of Ancient Times for Ian’s history notebook.

Science

This week in the God’s Design for Life curriculum we learned about fish.  In addition to reading lessons 11-13 in The World of Animals, we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Fish, Ian made a collage for his notebook, and he read About Fish by Cathryn Sill.

  

We started to read The Life Cycle of a Salmon by Bobbie Kalman, but Ian wasn’t as into it as he has been with other books in this series.  I ended up just leaving it out, along with The Life Cycle of a Shark, and The Life Cycle of a Sea Horse, which he enjoyed going through on his own while the others were napping.

Extras

This was our last week in the Salsa unit based on Caperucita Roja (Little Red Riding Hood).  All three older kids have learned so much from this program.  Although I usually only do the lesson plans with Ian, Elijah has started showing a fascination with using another language, and Arianna often requests to watch a Salsa video.  It’s fun to see them all learning together.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Happy Kids Songs
• UberSmart Math Facts
• “Who Created Everything” audio drama (from Wizzy Gizmo)
• Preschoolers and Peace: Homeschooling older kids with success while loving the little ones at your feet (e-book) by Kendra Fletcher

“Week 4” of school consisted of a week’s worth of lessons stretched out over about 10 days due to a family birthday (school holidays in our house), a beach day with friends, and baseball camp for Ian.  I had planned on this, so we didn’t get behind at all and we just took our time enjoying our lessons.

Bible

We skipped our morning reading time most mornings due to the extra activities and an odd schedule, so we only made it through a couple chapters of Prudence and the Millers, and then finished Proverbs 14 for our devotional reading.

As far as Bible study, we wanted to take a week to cover Esther before heading into the New Testament.  I love the story of Esther, but I was afraid the entire book might be a bit much for the boys, so we read from Egermeier’s Bible Story Book, breaking it up over several days.  Ian and I did the “Researching the Word” from Bible Road Trip: Year One, and we all watched the second episode of Buck Denver Asks: What’s in the Bible? Vol. 7 – Exile and Return, which tells about Esther.

Math

So far Ian is continuing to enjoy Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme.  I’m really impressed with how well MEP has worked for him.  There were times last year when I wondered if it was just too challenging, but the spiral approach is proving its value, and suddenly he’s understanding things and figuring out problems on his own that he was lost on a few months ago.

One of the activities in the MEP lesson plan called for matching several addition facts with their sums.  I was reminded of a game I had from when I was a teacher, and we pulled it out and enjoyed getting some extra facts practice in using “Matching Caps” from Learning Horizons.  It not only made that activity easy to do, it led a a full game of matching up facts.  Elijah eagerly joined us, and I have a feeling we’ll be getting it out on a regular basis.

It would be really easy to create a similar game using cards, and I think I might do that with specific fact families that Ian has trouble with since this game only goes up to sums of 10.

 

Literature (Ambleside Online)

I decided to deviate from our scheduled poetry book once again in order to complement our science study this week.  We enjoy reading more than one poem each day, so I know we’ll get through A Child’s Garden of Verses even with extra poetry books.  I just think it’s fun to include poems that tie in with other things we’re studying.

So this week we read from Feathers: Poems About Birds by Eileen Spinelli.  I wasn’t sure how Ian would respond to it, but he loved it!  He wanted to play the same game we did with Prayers from the Ark and The Creatures’ Choir a few weeks ago, where I read the poem first and he tried to guess what it was about.  This book was a little harder to that with unless you are a bird expert, but there were several that he was able to guess correctly, and he really enjoyed the book.

For our AO Year 1 readings we got to read our first story in James Herriot’s Treasury for Children, “Moses the Kitten”. I wasn’t sure how well this book was going to go over.  I bought the audiobook a while back and have tried to listen to it in the car on several occasions, but the boys always lost interest really quickly.

This week, however, I pulled out the book and snuggled on the couch close to Ian so he could see the illustrations.  He loved this story about a tiny kitten found near a pond on a farm in England.  When we got to the part where the farmer’s wife has named him Moses, I paused to see if he would react when I read,

“Moses?”

“Aye, you found him among the rushes didn’t you?”

It took a second, but then his eyes lit up and I heard a little chuckle.  He liked that connection.  When we had finished, he begged me to read another story from the book, but for now I want to stick to the schedule and keep him hungry for more.

History Cycle

I think pretty soon we’re going to veer away from using Mystery of History, Vol.1 as our framework, but for now it’s still helping provide just enough structure.  This week we covered Stonehenge, Early Egypt and the Minoan Civilization.

Stonehenge

When I told Ian we would be talking about Stonehenge this week, he instantly knew what I was talking about.  Grandma just returned from England and we got to see pictures of her there, and Ian told me that in one of the Lego movies he’s watched they talked about “LEGOhenge,” so he knew all about it.

Well, maybe not ALL about it.  We both learned a bit more by reading parts of two books I borrowed from the library: Stonehenge (Torque: The Unexplained) by Sean McDaniel (a great introduction to the subject, though I skipped the part about the alien theory) and Stonehenge by Cynthia Kennedy Henzel (which I preferred, even though it had more information than we could cover in just one day).  Then we watched this 3-minute clip from TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting that shows the Duggar family visiting Stonehenge.

Early Egypt (Old Kingdom)

Ian had been eagerly looking forward to this lesson so he could make the Khufu (Cheops) figure from Famous Figures of Ancient Times by Cathy Diez-Lucky.  We read bits and pieces from several books about Ancient Egypt to learn a little more about Khufu’s Great Pyramid.  Ian is familiar with the name because he has listened to Jonathan Park: The Whispering Sphinx multiple times.  It was helpful for him to see both a map of Egypt indicating where major historical sites are and a timeline showing the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.

We’ve spent a lot of time learning about Ancient Egypt and pyramids in the last couple years so I didn’t really linger on this lesson.  We read The Egyptian Cinderella, and Ian liked the connection with Aesop mentioned in the “Author’s Note” at the end of the book.  He also enjoyed reading through Ms Frizzle’s Adventures: Ancient Egypt with Daddy.

The Minoan Civilization

We read about the Minoans in Mystery of History, Vol 1 and Story of the World, Vol. 1 (Chapter 18) by Susan Wise Bauer.  Ian really enjoyed hearing about the bull-leaping, and when he started reading about Theseus and the Minotaur, he got excited and said he already knew the story.  It turns out he had read it on Starfall in a collection of Greek myths.  I love when we get to build context for things that are already familiar to him.

 

Science

This week in The World of Animals (part of the God’s Design for Life curriculum) we read the lessons on birds.  Ian made a bird collage and did the curriculum worksheet on the bird’s digestive system for his notebook.

To explore the subject a little more, we read About Birds by Cathryn Sill (paying specific attention to the different kinds of beaks the birds have) and Life Cycle of a Bird by Bobbie Kalman.

We also watched two episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy: Birds and Flight.  Ian picked up a book of science experiments called Air, Wind, and Flight that another homeschool family was giving away, and he enjoyed trying several of the experiments, saying, “This would go really well with our science study, Mom!”  I guess he thought I’d need convincing to let him go at it on his own.  He didn’t necessarily do them all correctly, but he had fun, it was a good learning experience, and he was really proud to show his work to Daddy that night.

 

Extras

In Spanish we moved on to the next Salsa video, #112, which is the last story in this set on Red Ridinghood.  We used Arianna’s dollhouse figures to practice family members and various commands, like “Salta con la abuela” (“Jump with the grandmother”) and “Anda con el niño” (“Walk with the boy”). Ian always thinks these are fun.

Summer is slipping away quickly!  We’re no longer the only ones doing school, and we’re looking forward to some fun outings once the public school kids go back and crowds thin out a bit.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Happy Kids Songs
• UberSmart Math Facts
• “Who Created Everything” audio drama (from Wizzy Gizmo)

Our school year is in full swing, and so far everything’s running smoothly.  We’ve even managed to get in a few extras like art and Spanish now that we’ve settled into a regular routine with our basic subjects.

Bible

We finished Wisdom and the Millers and read the first three chapters of Prudence and the Millers, along with Proverbs 14:11-29.  This book talks about making healthy choices and what the Bible says about caring for our bodies, so part of me is wishing I’d saved it for when we study the human body in science next term, but I think if we keep only reading a chapter a day we’ll still be in it then.  Ian’s been begging to get out our new microscope, so we used the lesson on being sick as a good excuse to pull it out and look at a slide of bacteria (and a bunch of other things!)

This was our last week of Long Story Short by Marty Machowski!  We read the story of Nehemiah (and did the corresponding research in Bible Road Trip).  We started this journey almost 2 years ago, and it feels so good to finish the whole book!  There are 78 weeks of lessons, but we took time off for things like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and when we moved.  This book has really blessed our family.  Eric and I are actually using parts of it for the 5th grade Sunday School class we’re teaching this year because it’s taught our family so much.

Math

Ian started Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme.  Right now it’s review so the lessons are pretty easy for him.  I’m trying to get back in the habit of doing the full lesson plan with him and not just the practice book pages.   (During our VBS week we kept doing those but dropped all the other parts of the lessons.)  He actually enjoys those parts the best, and I’m finding it easier to include them now that I printed out all the lesson plans rather than just reading them on my Kindle.

As I’ve researched MEP a little more I’ve found that although schools in the UK use Year 1 as the equivalent of Kindergarten like we did (with 5-6 year olds), the Hungarian schools (where it was originally developed) use Reception that year and hold off on Year 1 until the students are 6-7 years old.  Currently Ian’s doing well with where I’ve placed him, but now that I know I’ve got him on the really advanced end of the spectrum I won’t hesitate to slow down and give him time to catch up if it looks like things are getting too challenging.

Literature (Ambleside Online)

We’re back to reading from A Child’s Garden of Verses each morning.  In the readings from AO Year 1, “Beauty and the Beast” in The Blue Fairy Book was a highlight of our week.  It had been years since I read the original story, and so much of it had been replaced in my memory by the Disney version (which I also love).  This was a story that really captured Ian’s attention.  At one point I paused to take care of Nicholas, and he begged me to continue, afraid I was putting it down for the day.  I kept reading a little more when I was able, but it was a really long story and we ended up splitting it over two days.

Part of our Ambleside Online lessons is narration, which means the child repeating what they heard back in their own words.  It’s an important part of the learning process and helps the child really process the information that’s being read.  Narration is new for Ian, and some days he does better than others.  I’m reading through a blog series from Simply Charlotte Mason hoping to find some ways to encourage him.

In Lightning Literature (review coming next week) our story was Caps for Sale (one of our favorites!)  The grammar lessons moved on from capital letters to ending punctuation.  Since we’re finishing up this review, we also went back to Spelling You See, picking up where we ended last year with Week 16 of Level B (Jack and Jill), which fits a little better with our style.

History Cycle

We continued using the lesson subjects from Mystery of History, Vol.1 as a framework for our history studies.  This week it seemed like we did a lot, but Ian and I both enjoyed it.  I didn’t like history class when I was in school, but I’ve always liked reading books about history on my own, so I’m hoping this will be one of Ian’s favorite subjects.  I love bringing the stories alive for him.

The Sumerians

I summarized the information about the Sumerians in Mystery of History, Vol.1 and then read about Sargon the Great in The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer.  Ian made a moveable figure of Sargon from Famous Figures of Ancient Times by Cathy Diez-Lucky.  He really liked that project, so I let him make the one for Narmer, the pharoah who united Upper and Lower Egypt as well.  (We read about him over our summer break.)

Ian played with those figures throughout the day.  As he showed them to Elijah I asked him to tell about each man, helping him to remember some of the key things we had read.  He couldn’t wait to show Daddy and tell him about these men as soon as he got home.  He’s already asking when he can put more of them together, so it will be fun getting to find lessons on the rest of the people in the book.  I had him add them to his history notebook by slipping them into plastic page protectors.

The Tower of Babel

This was a familiar story to Ian, so we didn’t spend a lot of time on it.  We read the biblical account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9 and then talked about languages.  Ian enjoyed listening to Spanish children’s songs while he worked on his notebook pages.

“I can’t understand what they’re saying!” he kept telling me.

“That’s the point!” I reminded him.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The ancient story of Gilgamesh is included in both Mystery of History and The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer.  Rather than reading it from either of those books, however, I chose to use the picture book trilogy by Ludmila Zeman.

On Monday we started with Gilgamesh the King.  (I wrongly assumed we would have to stretch out the series over the whole week, so I wanted to get a jump on it.)  Ian listened intently and enjoyed the rich illustrations.  We talked about how old legends often have bits of truth in them, but then people also make up details of their own (like about Gilgamesh being half-god).  On Tuesday we read The Revenge of Ishtar, and Ian liked it so much we went ahead and just read The Last Quest of Gilgamesh that day as well.  I’m glad I found these books.  Ian really remembered the stories well and I think they made a much bigger impression than he would have gotten just reading from the MoH text or Story of the World.

Science

So far I am really pleased with my decision to use the God’s Design for Life curriculum from Answers in Genesis for science this year.  Right now we’re just reading the “Beginners” section of each lesson in the textbook, though I look through the section for older kids and point out anything I think would interest Ian.  Although these lessons alone are probably sufficient for a 1st grade level, they’re simple enough that I’m using them as a framework for selecting related books to explore with Ian a little deeper.

This was our last week talking about mammals.  We watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Mammals, which even Elijah (not usually a fan) really enjoyed.  He caught onto a lot of the “mammal” talk going on this week and was definitely starting to classify things in his head.  Several times throughout the week he’d check with me, “So an elephant is a mammal?”  “So Shamu is a mammal?”  It’s rare for him to show interest in any of our lessons besides math, so I was more than happy to draw him into discussions.

Here’s what Ian and I read to expand on the lessons in the book:

Aquatic Mammals

Ian read If a Dolphin Were a Fish by Loren Wlodarski to me, and then I read him Baby Whales Drink Milk by Barbara Juster Esbensen.  We watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Marine Mammals (there were several evolutionary references we discussed).  Ian also got out A Whale of a Tale: All About Porpoises, Dolphins, and Whales by Bonnie Worth from The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library series.

Marsupials

After reading the lesson in The World of Animals, we read About Marsupials by Cathryn Sill.  I usually think of this series as being for younger children, but even I learned a few things from this particular book.  Ian also really enjoyed The Life Cycle of a Koala by Bobbie Kalman.  This is the series we’re starting to use more often because the books have a lot more information.  So far, Ian’s found them fascinating.

For his notebook, Ian finished up his page from last week with a section about whales and then wanted to devote a whole page to marsupials.  We searched for pictures online and printed them out so he could make a collage.

Now that we’ve finished three weeks of notebooking through our history and science studies, Ian is really enjoying seeing the book he’s creating.  He pulled them out several times this week to flip through the books from beginning to end, reviewing the pages he’s made and remembering what they were about.  I think this is going to be a powerful learning tool for him as well as a wonderful record of what we study.

Electives

We finally managed to spend some time in ARTistic Pursuits K-3 Vol. 2: Stories of Artists and Their Art. (We got through the first third last year when we review it, and I’d really like to complete the book.)  Ian’s portrait of Nicholas didn’t turn out quite the way he hoped, but he had fun painting it and learned a valuable lesson.  (Don’t make the background “skin colored” or you won’t be able to see your subject very well!)

The kids really missed our Spanish lessons, so they were glad to go back to the Salsa videos, picking up with #111, which is the fifth in the series of six episodes written around the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  I kept using the Salsa materials from the Wyoming Department of Education with Ian, though I’m starting to be really stretched in my Spanish abilities.  Even though everything is scripted for the teacher, it’s just not rolling off my tongue very well.  I’m determined to push through though, because I think it’s really important for my kids to know Spanish in Southern California.  I’ve definitely seen Ian’s comprehension growing (as well as my own), and I hope I can at least help build a foundation for him to learn the language on his own as he gets older.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Lightening Literature 1st Grade (from Hewitt Homeschooling)
• Happy Kids Songs
• Mathletics (from 3P Learning)
• UberSmart Math Facts
• “Who Created Everything” audio drama (from Wizzy Gizmo)