His Treasure Seekers

 We are one third of the way through our school year!  This week wrapped up our first 12-week term, and we celebrated by starting our fall break a little early and heading to a local indoor playground on Friday to stay out of the triple digit heat that’s stealing autumn’s glory.  We still have the boys’ writing class next Tuesday, but other than that we’ll be taking next week off from our usual school subjects.

This week in our Preschool

This week we were able to do more of what I had planned on for this year as far as preschool time with Arianna.  I got out our autumn books and we spent time enjoying activities related on The Little Scarecrow Boy by Margaret Wise Brown (see my last post for more details).

(In the story, the little scarecrow boy practices making scary faces.  Hence the tongue.)

Science

We finished reading the last few lessons in Our Weather & Water, then spent some time discussing coral reefs and examining some pieces of coral with a magnifying glass.

Then we watched The Magic School Bus Goes to Mussel Beach to wrap up this unit.  It feels so good to have completed something!  The book is now back on the shelf waiting to be pulled out again next time around if I decide to stick with a four year science cycle.  (That’s my plan at least for the elementary years, and we’ll be in those for at least another decade or so.)

Read Alouds

We continued reading King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green to supplement our history of the Middle Ages, and finished Mary Poppins, by P.L. Travers for our fun reading this week.

Independent Learning

I’m really thankful that we gave Teaching Textbooks Math 3 a try this year.  Both boys are thriving on it, and it’s freed me up to spend more time with the little ones while they work through their lessons, though I’m usually watching on the big TV screen out of the corner of my eye.  I like it so much I went ahead and purchased Math 4 for when they finish up these lessons.

The one frustration I’ve had with the program, however, is that it doesn’t emphasize the importance of adding the ones column first when doing multiple digit addition (or subtraction).  At first it didn’t matter that Ian was starting with the numbers on the left because he didn’t have to carry (or borrow), but once he started getting into bigger numbers it obviously became an issue.  I’ve been trying to encourage him to write down the problems but he has been really resistant.  This week, however, I stumbled upon an idea that he really liked, and now he doesn’t complain at all about it.  I folded the paper up into sixteenths, intending just to help him make good use of the whole sheet, but he preferred leaving it folded up like a little book, and he got such a kick out of it that suddenly his stubbornness melted away and he enthusiastically jotted down each problem in his little “notebook.”  Whatever makes things fun, right?

Upcoming Reviews

We’re got a whole bunch of reviews to watch for in the next few weeks:

• several resources from Institute for Excellence in Writing
• Little Boy (movie on DVD)
• The Nutcracker CD from Maestro Classics
• The Ultimate Homeschool Planner from Apologia
• Brinkman Adventures, Season 3 (audio drama)
• Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere: A Fibonacci Tale by Ann McCallum
• Goodnight, Manger by Laura Sassi, illustrated by Jane Chapman
• Grapevine Studies: Old Testament 1
• When Lightening Struck! The Story of Martin Luther by Danika Cooley

I love the feeling of a week well done.  We were still finishing up school at 4:00 Friday afternoon (unexpected circumstances wiped out most of Thursday), but we got through everything I had hoped to complete, and the boys were still working with a good attitude right up to the very end.  That right there just made my week.  Everything they accomplished was just icing on the cake.

Preschool

After last week’s emphasis on blocks, we moved on to play dough this week.  All the kids found a spot at the table at some point during the week, but Elijah and Arianna put in the most hours for sure.

Arianna really wanted to spend time on Reading Eggs this week, and to my surprise she specifically requested to do lessons she’d already done.  Since I’ve been concerned that she was flying through lessons without really absorbing what was being taught, I decided to reset her lessons all the way back to the beginning.  She really liked going through them again with the extra boost of confidence that comes from knowing what to expect.  I felt a little bad at erasing the progress she had made, but I think it was the right decision.

Science

Our lessons this week in Our Weather & Water (from God’s Design for Heaven and Earth) had to do with exploring the ocean.  This is a topic that has fascinated Ian in the past, so much of it was review.  Elijah joined us in reading the lessons, and then all the kids enjoyed watching Bill Nye the Science Guy: Ocean Exploration.  We also talked again about Dr. Robert Ballard, probably best known for finding the wreck of Titanic, who is one of the world’s leading ocean explorers.  He happens to be an old friend of my dad’s, so we’ve enjoyed following his work over the years and checking in with his Nautilus Live website to see what’s currently being explored and studied.

Read Alouds

We’ve continued doing a lot of reading over the last couple weeks.  Ian’s Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course had him scheduled to read The Minstrel in the Tower by Gloria Skurzynski over the past two weeks, but he enjoyed it so much we flew through it in a couple days.  Then we moved on to some of my own historical literature selections.

We started with The Little Duke by Charlotte Mary Yonge.  I was unfamiliar with this classic, but it is one of the books scheduled for Ambleside Online Year 2 and it fit with the time period so I thought we’d give it a try.  Ian surprised me with how much he enjoyed the book, and we finished it early as well, moving on to King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green.  We only got through the first part of the first chapter this week, but that was a perfect intro and led us to watch The Sword in the Stone for family movie night, which all the kids enjoyed.

      For fun reading, we continued in James Howe’s Bunnicula and Friends series with The Celery Stalks at Midnight and Nighty-Nightmare.

   

Independent Learning

Both boys continue daily drills on xtramath.org, and this week Elijah finished up the first grade lessons on CTCMath.com.  I debated several options for what to do with him at this point.

• Stick with CTCMath and move on to 2nd grade?
• Go back to lessons and practice book pages from MEP?
• Take a “break” by switching to Life of Fred?
• or let him do what Ian’s doing for 2nd grade and dive into Teaching Textbooks Math 3?

I narrowed it down to the first and last options just because the other two would require more from me than I can consistently give in this season and then asked him what he would prefer.  He decided to join Ian on Teaching Textbooks.  Since that’s my long-term curriculum plan at this point anyway I decided there wasn’t much point in trying to put it off just because technically he’s only in Kindergarten.  I doubt he’ll have any trouble based on what Ian’s done so far, but if at some point it gets too hard we still have other options.

Upcoming Reviews

We’ve got a lot products we’re checking out right now, so watch for these reviews coming soon:

• 2nd semester of Elementary (K-2) Spanish from Middlebury Interactive Languages
• several resources from Institute for Excellence in Writing
• Little Boy (movie on DVD)
• The Nutcracker CD from Maestro Classics
• The Ultimate Homeschool Planner from Apologia
• Brinkman Adventures, Season 3 (audio drama)
• Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere: A Fibonacci Tale by Ann McCallum
• Goodnight, Manger by Laura Sassi, illustrated by Jane Chapman
• Grapevine Studies: Old Testament 1

We tend to follow a loose “Sabbath” schedule when it comes to schooling: 6 weeks on and then a week of rest.  Right now I’m wishing I were a little stricter about that.  It’s been 6 weeks and I am definitely ready for a little breather.  However, since we’re about to take several weeks off for the arrival of a baby brother, I’m trying to push through at least one more week before we let things go for a while.  So we just finished up a pretty solid week and I’m hoping we can finish strong this coming Friday.

This week in our Preschool

I finally got our flannel board set reorganized and ready to use!  This has been on my to-do list for weeks, and while didn’t actually get around to using it as we learned about Lazarus this week in Old Story New, I feel better knowing that we’ve taken a baby step in the right direction.

Arianna decided to pick back up with her Reading Eggs lessons.  She had started finding them challenging, so I hadn’t brought them up for a couple weeks and figured I’d let her mature a little.  I was surprised at how much she has remembered, and I think her main problem right now is confidence.  I want to spend a little more time working with her to provide some encouragement.

Science

We plowed through four lessons in Our Weather & Water, skipping the activities because I had zero interest in them and Ian didn’t ask at all.  That had originally been my intention for this whole term, so I’m trying not to feel guilty.  We’ve done far more already than I ever planned on.

Literature

Most of the literature I have planned for this year is connected in some way with Ian’s history course. Veritas Press has specific assignments that correspond with the lessons, but since some weeks have no assignments (and since we’ve read about half of those given), I’ve lined up a few choices of my own.

This past week we started Beowulf as retold by Michael Polpurgo, with beautiful illustrations by Michael Foreman.  I remembered very little about this early British epic from my high school “study” of it, but at some point I stumbled upon this book, and this week I decided to give it a try.  It’s probably a little gory for some families, but I was willing to over look those aspects, and actually that’s probably what made it such a hit with Ian.  He begged me to keep reading each day, so it looks like we’ll get through the entire book in two weeks rather than the three I had originally planned.  I was pleasantly surprised by how often the characters referred to God and gave Him the glory for their triumphs and victories.  This book may not make everyone’s literature list for their 2nd grader, but I’m really glad I pulled it out.  Usually Ian just endures my literature selections without much comment, so his enthusiastic reception of Beowulf was a breath of fresh air.  I think he’ll remember far more about the story than I did.

Independent Learning

The boys are continuing to do well in their independent computer lessons.  Ian finished up the Storylands lessons on Reading Eggs and is now back to working through the Skills Bank spelling lessons.  Both boys have settled in and are doing much better with their daily facts practice on xtramath.org, and I’m pleased with the progress their making in their lessons on CTCMath.com. (Elijah) and Teaching Textbooks Math 3 (Ian).

I continue to be impressed with the Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course (Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation).  Ian has never been so eager to study history!  He’s being asked to remember a lot of dates and facts, and I was concerned he would find it too boring (or too challenging), but he looks forward to his history lesson each day and is learning far more than I expected.  This past week he learned about Justinian the great, Byzantine architecture, and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.  I was hoping to find time to do a mosaic craft, but it didn’t happen.

A few final thoughts

Mom had some school assignments this week as well.  I started going through the Teaching Writing: Structure and Style DVD seminar from the Institute for Excellence in Writing.  I have heard so many positive things about IEW over the last few years, and since Ian and Elijah are going to be part of an IEW class with some other homeschool friends starting in September, I decided it was time to learn more about it.

I have always enjoyed writing myself, but even as a classroom teacher I struggled with helping students learn how to write.  I have a feeling I’ll be reviewing these DVDs multiple times in the years to come, but I’m hoping to at least build a basic foundation so I can understand what the boys are learning in their class this fall.  This week I made it through the first two DVDs (there are twelve in the seminar altogether), and already I’m feeling much more confident that I’m not going to completely fail my children when it comes to helping them develop as writers!

Upcoming Reviews

Here’s a peak at the reviews I’ll be posting soon:

• Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set (from Alpha Omega Publications)
• Christopher Columbus: Across the Ocean Sea (book and study guide from YWAM Publishing)
• Wonky and Tapple (two games from USAopoly)
• 2nd semester of Elementary (K-2) Spanish from Middlebury Interactive Languages

 

 This week was Arianna’s turn to do something special.  While the boys were home working on their school subjects each morning (not much to write about there), she trotted off to a local church for “God’s Royal Dance Camp” for a few hours of dance, music, Bible, and crafts.  I thought it would just be a fun week for her, but at the presentation on the final day I realized it was so much more.

I was so moved watching dozens of children dancing on stage to songs repeating over and over, “God made me beautiful,” “I’m wanted,” “God loves me,” and other crucial truths that so many children never come to know.  I love that as a three-year old, one of the first Bible verses to ever be planted in her heart is, “People look at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.”  Yes, she loved looking beautiful like a ballerina, but all week she was hearing about the importance of inner beauty.  What a blessing it is to have so many women and older girls speaking these things into her heart!  It was the best week of “school” she could have!

 Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks:

• Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set (from Alpha Omega Publications)
• Christopher Columbus: Across the Ocean Sea (from YWAM Publishing)

 This was one of those weeks when we’re thankful for the flexibility of homeschooling.  The older boys had the opportunity to take horseback riding lessons for two mornings, so we squeezed in a little extra work before and after so they could just enjoy some time with Grandma and the cousins joining them on those days.

I realize a homeschool supermom would have used such an opportunity to do a full-blown unit study on horses, or at the very least tie in a Five in a Row book to enhance the whole learning experience, but since I’m not trying to win any awards, we didn’t do a single horse-related thing outside of their lessons.  I didn’t even use the time while the boys were gone to do some extra special preschool time with my little ones.  We went grocery shopping with two less kids and got in some long naps.  How’s that for a good use of our time?

Here’s what we did manage to get done this week when the boys weren’t out grooming and riding Pixie the pony:

Science

We read lessons 7-9 in Our Weather & Water, covering the ice age, global warming, and the water cycle, but we didn’t do any of the activities.  The kids all enjoyed watching The Magic School Bus: Kicks Up a Storm about weather and The Magic School Bus: Wet All Over about the water cycle.

Literature

We read a few stories in D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths.  Most of these tales are new to me, though I’m realizing I’ve heard references to them often, so even though we’re no longer learning about the Vikings, I’m planning to keep reading a little each week until we finish the book.

Independent Learning

The boys finished most of the lessons on their weekly checklists in the first half of the week, so when they finished up their riding lessons they each only had one or two things to do on Friday.

Language Skills

In Reading Eggs,they both decided to take a break from the Skills Bank to do lessons in Storylands.  Elijah loves his Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship workbook and often wants to complete several lessons in one day.

Math

They’re continuing to improve with their math facts on xtramath.org.  Elijah’s working through addition, and Ian has pretty much mastered addition and subtraction.  I’m trying to decide whether to try to improve his speed on those facts or move on to multiplication.

The boys are becoming more independent in their lessons on CTCMath.com and Teaching Textbooks Math 3.  I didn’t realize how much I had walked through the lessons with them until I forced myself to stay away and do things in other parts of the house while they worked.  They’ve both stumbled a little without me carrying them, but they’ve managed to get through and I think it’s going to make for a much smoother year once the baby arrives, now that they’re learning not to rely on me so much.

History

Ian’s Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation covered St. Jerome and the Latin Vulgate this week.  I am learning so much from this course, and I hope Ian is too.  The memory song runs through my head day and night, and Ian and I have both learned most of it by heart.  All the younger children come running into the room when he gets to that part of the lesson, and it will be interesting to see what they absorb.

Because of the boys’ riding lessons, I decided to postpone the assigned reading until next week.

A few final thoughts

I’m so thankful that homeschooling gives us the freedom to do school in the summer (when I want to hide in my nice air conditioned house!), take a few days off for horseback riding lessons, work at the children’s individual ability levels, and learn about God’s hand in history rather than just sticking with the public school social studies curriculum.  So many parts of our week were only possible because of the homeschooling lifestyle.  It’s what I longed for as a child, and I’m so blessed that our family has this opportunity.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks:

• With Lee in Virginia (audio adventure from Heirloom Audio Productions)
• Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers by Susan Kilbride
• Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set (from Alpha Omega Publications)
• The Conversation by Leigh A. Bortins (founder of Classical Conversations)

 In spite of my great hopes of adding on a little each week, this past week we really didn’t do much more than we had our first week of school.  Actually, I think we did even less, because I didn’t attempt any sort of preschool at all.  However, our school room/family room is starting to come together, and for that I am thankful.  I’ve managed to unpack at least a few boxes of books almost every day, and it’s a vast improvement over last week.

Science

We zipped through our three lessons in Our Weather & Water (from God’s Design for Heaven and Earth), making air currents with hot air from the stove, discussing the difference in weather versus climate, and having fun learning about condensation by breathing on a mirror.

Independent Learning

The boys have found their groove when it comes to their independent work on the computer.  They work through their lessons on Reading Eggs, CTCMath.com (Elijah), and Teaching Textbooks Math 3 (Ian) without any problems, and while they’re still trying to catch up to their previous ease on xtramath.org, they definitely saw some improvement this week.

Elijah got started on the Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set, and thankfully he’s been really receptive to my input.  (He had been teaching himself to write letters, some incorrectly, and I was a little worried that he would resist any attempts to retrain those patterns.)  The lessons are pretty short, and he’s really enjoying it so far.

I’m surprised to find that the highlight of school for Ian each day is his history lesson.  He’s really enjoying the Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation.  This week the reading assignment for Level 1 was supposed to be St. George and the Dragon retold by Margaret Hodges, but since we’ve read that book to Ian countless times over the past couple years I gave him another option: D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths.  It fit in well with our week on “Barbarian Invasion and Vikings,” plus he was immediately intrigued when the Introduction mentioned Thor, whom he’s come across in super hero books at the library.

A few final thoughts

My goal this coming week is to get my flannel board pieces re-organized.  (They got jumbled up in the move).  Ian has been eager to start using them to teach Arianna Bible stories, so I want to make that happen soon while he’s still interested!

Oh, and I’m STILL searching for our printer.  It must be in some mislabeled box stashed in the garage or a shed, because I have done several thorough searches and it’s just nowhere to be found.  Thank goodness for friends who’ve helped me get a few essential printed, but I’m ready to just have ours set up and ready to use whenever I need it!

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks:

• With Lee in Virginia (audio adventure from Heirloom Audio Productions)
• Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers by Susan Kilbride
• Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set (from Alpha Omega Publications)
• The Conversation by Leigh A. Bortins (founder of Classical Conversations)

I had my doubts as to whether or not we were really going to start “on time” this year, but Monday came around and I found that it just made sense to dive in.  So here we are.

This year is going to look a little different from years past, so we’ll probably be making constant adjustments.  My plan this year is to focus on my preschooler (making sure to include my Kindergartner who didn’t really get much of a preschool experience), while helping my 2nd grader develop some independence.  I have my ideas about how that’s going to happen, but I’m sure it will end up looking quite different by the time we get through the year.

This week in our Preschool

I actually didn’t plan on doing much this week with Arianna, so the fact that we did anything at all was pretty amazing.  (Keep in mind that in addition to juggling life with 4 kids 7 and under, I’m 31 weeks pregnant and we just moved 3 weeks ago.  I’m giving myself lots of grace!)  When we started the week, this is what our school library looked like:

The only thing I’d managed to unpack was our Five in a Row (FIAR) books.  Arianna asked me to read her Harold and the Purple Crayon, so we pulled it out and I basically just “rowed” through the FIAR (Vol.2) manual with her and Elijah.  It wasn’t nearly as elaborate as the last time we rowed Harold, but I think that will probably be the case with a lot of our rows this year.  After all, last time I was only trying to do school with one child, not three. My goal is to row two books a month.

It was fun seeing the kids get excited as the week went on and I managed to get more books unpacked. They loved rediscovering old favorites, and I was pleased to see them getting into some new books that had gone previously unnoticed as well.

Arianna has started lessons on Reading Eggs, but I’m leaving the pace completely up to her.  I think she got through two lessons this week, which is plenty.

Science

I honestly am not planning to do a lot of science this year, but we actually did quite a bit this week.  In addition to reviewing a book of science units, we started Our Weather & Water, one of the three books in God’s Design for Heaven and Earth, our main science curriculum this year.  I chose to start with this book because I knew that between our move and the baby coming, our first term needs to be pretty light, and out of the three books for the year, this one interested me the least. I figured we’d just read through it and not spend a lot of time on extras.

To my surprise, the three lessons we covered this week all caught Ian’s interest, and we ended up having a lot of fun doing the activities for each one.

• We looked at a weather report for our area and discussed the different features.  Then we looked up different cities around the world to see what things were like there.  When I asked Ian what places we should look at he immediately wanted to see what the weather was like in Japan.  We looked up Tokyo’s forecast, and it was fascinating to know that it would be raining there for days while here things are hot and sunny.
• We talked about different components of air and experimented with a candle burning under a jar.  We hypothesized about how long the flame could last under different sized jars.  Ian discovered that if he lifted the jar off as soon as he saw the flame getting smaller, the new supply of oxygen prevented it from going out.

• We balanced two empty balloons and then blew one up to show that it was heavier when full of air, even though air seemed to be weightless when we first thought about it.

I don’t know that we’ll always spend so much time on our science curriculum, but it was definitely a fun part of our week.

Independent Learning

My main goal for this week was to help Ian and Elijah become familiar with their independent learning routines so that they’ll know what’s expected of them this year.  I created checklists for each boy, and told them that as long as they’re caught up through each day’s work they’ll be able to play outside with neighborhood friends, join us for family movies, etc.  If they want to work ahead and finish their work early in the week, they can choose to do that as well.

Language Skills

When I signed Arianna up for Reading Eggs, I also renewed both boys’ accounts even though they both finished the main reading lessons long ago.  There are still plenty of things for them to do, and for now I’m letting them choose between lessons in the Skills Bank (spelling), Storylands (reading comprehension), and Reading Eggspress (more advanced reading comprehension).  I also let Ian spend time in the Story Factory (creating his own story) for one of his two lessons this week.

Math

Both boys are back to daily drills on xtramath.org.  (They were dismayed to see how much their scores had worsened after a month off!)

Elijah is continuing to work through the 1st grade lessons on CTCMath.com.

Ian started Teaching Textbooks Math 3, and I think it’s going to be a good fit for him this year.

History

Ian started the Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation.  I had heard wonderful things about these courses before we signed up, so I’ve been eager to see what it was going to be like.  I was a little surprised by how much information was introduced this week (they’re geared for grades 2-6, so it was definitely a bit of a leap), but Ian really enjoyed the format of the course and did better than I expected as far as following along and picking up details.  And the memory song is already doing its job; I’ve found it running through my head day and night.

My goal is for him to be totally independent in the online portion of the course (we all enjoyed following along on the TV though), but I may make some substitutions for the literature assignments since we’ve already read several of the books that are scheduled for the year.

A few final thoughts

I’d say we’re about 60% up and running at this point.  Our only Bible lessons this week were our family devotions in Old Story New (we just finished up week 26) as well as introducing some new catechism questions, but I’d like to do a bit more with the little ones (like breaking out the flannel board set and doing some crafts) as we settle into our routine.

I haven’t fully decided on what we’ll be doing for Spanish, so we’re not starting that yet.  Also I’d like to have Ian go through the next level of Spelling You See (as soon as I find what I need to make that happen–it’s in a box SOMEwhere), and Elijah is going to start working through the Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set from Alpha Omega Publication as soon as it arrives.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks:

• With Lee in Virginia (audio adventure from Heirloom Audio Productions)
• Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers by Susan Kilbride
• Horizons 1st Grade Penmanship set (from Alpha Omega Publications)
• The Conversation by Leigh A. Bortins (founder of Classical Conversations)