Do you feel a slump? These past few weeks we have been feeling a bit tired of the schedule, the routine feels a bit dry. I sense it in the boys and for myself I have had my mind elsewhere on other things and so have they. We did not take a break at Christmas for more than a few days and we talk a lot about our up coming trip in March, so it would seem we have early spring fever. It could be time to dig in and push or step back for a rest....after praying I sensed rest was what we needed. So, last week we took a few days off to work on projects, both for myself and for them. This helped a whole lot just to get out from under the mental pile of things that builds up. It was rejuvenating to have some free time to just to get those undine things done. The boys played outside and were rosy with sunshine, drew pictures form Ed Emberley's Make a World book, and then it we were better able to return to the schedule again. I was too!
Bible: We are wrapping up our reading of the book of Revelations soon and the boys have chosen 1st and 2nd Peter to read next.
Stories of Faith: We completed our reading of Twice Freed and have begun Polycarp Crown of Fire (torch bears series).
Mathematics: Our new rota is working well! The boys are able to do the math pages five days out of the week, two pages a day, from Everyday Number Stories by themselves which is wonderful. Then on project day, they do the Matrix. TJ improved his time and accuracy on the Matrix as well. Yeah TJ!
Aesop Copy Work: Zak has been working furiously all this year to get this book DONE! Yes he is a finisher and most motivated to just get it done. And he has done it! So, he gets a break during this period of the day to play quietly while his brother work on their handwriting and coloring. We have talked about doing cursive next...I can't wait. We did a little cursive when they first learned to write to get the left to right order ingrained and now we will head back to it.
Ancient Greek History: We have read through all of the Heroes by Charles Kingsley and have begun to read and narrate through D'Auliers book of Greek Myths. This is a good one for the boys to narrate from as the excerpts are short and descriptive. I did not have them narrate the Heroes for the reason that the stories were long, full of difficult names and hard to know how to break it up into smaller meaningful chunks for them. Instead I had them narrate from another book we read right after lunch, Three Greek Children, and that worked out much better.
The Study of Birds: We are now reading The Adventures of Mr. Mocker by Thornton Burgess.
Nature Notebook:
What the boys found in the yard this week...
Geography: We have been reading Peeps at Many Lands Ancient Greece by James Baikie.
Language Arts: We are taking a short break from the lessons in Primary Language Lessons to do a unit study on a poetry book by Douglas Florian, it is called On the Wing. I am using a poetry guide from blackbird&company to guide us along. Thus far we have
We also drew one of the birds from the book and wrote a few sentences about it in our composition notebooks (bought at Walmart).The assignment was to write something about the bird they chose. I find it helps them to require a certain number of sentences like four or three.
Max's Poem
I hum, I glum, I do not scum.
I twirl, I whirl, I am a girl.
I eat nectar with my scepter.
I am not a woodpecker, I do not drum.
TJ wrote:
The hawk has sharp eyes.
He uses binoculars.
The hawk has sharp claws to tear his prey.
Rabbits are scared of him.
Douglas Florian has also written these books (the blackbird&company guide has lesson with all the books below. I hope to do them all):
In the Swim
Lizards, Frogs, and Polliwogs
Mammalabilia
Insectlopedia
Reading practice: Two pages each day out of Elson Reader Book three.
Bed Time Read Aloud: Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.
Latin: Minimus Chapter 7 latin words for weapons, and we made small replicas of armor and weapons for our wooden man. (bought at IKEA)
Art: We have begun a 24 page mural from Artprojectsforkids.com. It is called the Ode to Matisse. The boys are very enthusiastic about it so I am confident we will finish. While they color we listen to Chopin. To begin the mural we first did a coloring page of the entire mural.
Music: We are wrapped up our look and listen to Fredrick Chopin this week. To finalize the study we added him to our composer lapbook, timeline and did a music appreciation page.
Max's music appreciation sheet and inside of the lapbook.
Hope you have a great week!
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