Week Twenty Two Wrap-Up

We hope you had a wonderful Valentines's Day! I made heart hand pies for the boys and we topped it of with coconut cream YUM! We are in the throws of preparing for our Spring Break that will last three months. We will be doing school partly on the road as we travel about seeing family and friends. When you' all take a break for summer we will be getting back to the books. So if the postings are sporadic form here on out that is why. Now about this week.

Bible: 2 Peter with Dad over breakfast.

Latin: We are into Chapter 8 in our Minimus text book. Only 4 chapters left for this year, then we do a few weeks of review of the whole year and we will be onto Secondus.

Copy work: Max is still working through the Aesop's copybook and should be finished this week, so I have begun to review cursive with the twins. We began writing in cursive due to the fact that they all needed help with the left to right orientation of our English language. Then we learned print, so for the remainder of this year they will be doing cursive practice using some copy work booklets from Westvon Publishing.

Zak chose to copy sayings from the civil war, Tj chose sayings about pets, and Max chose to work on sayings about the solar system.

Primary Language Lessons: The boys have been preparing for dictation all week. Two chose to locate hard words in each sentence and copy those each three times each, and Zak preferred to simply copy the whole passage. Then they switched and did the opposite and so after three days of reading, copying and looking at the passage they were given dictation of it and they all did well. They corrected their own mistakes with a red pencil.

Mathematics: This is the second time we have gone through the Everyday Number Stories and on this pass through the material the boys noted for themselves how much better they understand the math. Yeah!

Art: We read Drawing With Scissors, a short book report on Henry Matisse, last week and so this week have been doing some of that....drawing with scissors.

Music: The boys have been doing some music appreciation, filling in of booklets about Robert Schuman for our composer lap books and listening to his lovely music as they play quietly.

Insects: We just completed our reading of The Tale of Daddy Longlegs by Arthur Scott Bailey. Now the boys have chosen to read.....We will decide today.

Nature Notebook:

Geography: The Young Carthaginian by G. A. Henty

History of Ancient Rome: We are reading and narrating through The Story of the Romans the story by Gruber and enhanced by Christine Miller.  We are almost done making our myth pockets. This week we put together two, one for Pandora's Box and another for The Race for Atlanta.

Stories of Faith: We are listening to Ben Hur: A tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

Reading Practice: Elson Reader Book three

Bed time Read Aloud: The Secret Seven Adventure Collection by Eind Blyton

Cheers!

Week Eighteen Wrap-Up

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 read laughed through all of the poems and paintings. Wonderful! and we have learned about some interesting descriptive words he uses: CRIMSON, HUDDLE, MIMIC, HUE, and HOVER. The boys have really picked up on the word crimson and shriek with excitement whenever they hear it. Fun!

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!

Week Fourteen Wrap-Up

What a fun week we have had.  It wasn't a fun week because we did anything particularly exciting or new, or that all went really perfectly. It was fun because we were together and our lessons are finally gelling into place. I have made quite a few adjustments this year that I did not think I would be making but I am ever so happy I did. This week was fun for me because I did not adjust much of anything and have been riding along on the plans we have already made. I can see some of results of handing over my way of doing home education to Charlotte's wise advice and it makes those elusive smooth and easy days seem more tangible. Not that there were not trying moments in our week, for there were melt downs and discipline was still applied, but trusting in an idea and just hanging on until you see results gives a measure of peace and rest. In my own mind the days are smoother because I know where I am going, I know how I will handle it and most importantly I know why I am doing it.  I love this quote by Louisa May Alcott and the lovely way that Emily McDowell has rendered it in this poster. It sort of sums up why my week was so much fun, I am now enjoying the waves as they hit against my ship.

Bible: Genesis with Dad over a tasty breakfast. I made a huge (because I have a new range in my kitchen that is bigger than the one I had before) batch of granola with medjool dates which we all love. Makes starting a new day even sweeter. :)

Stories of Faith: We have begun a fun Christmas story called This Way to Christmas. It was part of the amazing deal I purchased last summer from Yesterday's classics. They are doing it again just now before Christmas too! I have always adored their selection of vintage books but with so many free online it was hard to pay for a printed book and feel good about it. I use my kindle a lot so when they offered their entire kindle collection for only $50 I snatched it up. This way to Christmas was in the package deal and we are now enjoying this heart warming tale.

Math: Much to the chagrin of the boys we are still doing a rotation of The Matrix and the Usborne Math puzzles book, we call it the caveman book. They are enjoying the math puzzles but they are getting weary of doing the Multiplication Matrix. So I read to them what the author of the matrix said about why he made it and we looked at some strategy to learn how to fill in the table faster and easier. Seemed to help. Here is a quote from the author:

"The history of this matrix goes back to the ‘70’s when my wife and I operated an individual learning center teaching reading, math, and English, K – adult. We used a lot of programmed-learning materials and audio-visual aids, computer, etc. Students beyond third-grade (even adults) were found to be shaky in their multiplication tables, which affected their insights into numerical relationships and their work in the higher operations. “The Matrix” became a standard drill until they could do one correctly in 2 minutes or less, three days in a row."

Our best time is 6 minutes so we are almost there.

We read about Albert Einstein in Mathematicians are people too Vol. 2 and began a longer book about the same guy by Kathleen Krull. This book is part of her giants of science series. We read her book about Isaac Newton last year and really enjoyed it, and we are enjoying this one too.

Ancient Greek History: Alexander the Great by John Gunther is our text this week and the boys are doing so much better at their narrations. They are better at summing up what the main ideas is and adding supporting details to explain that idea better. This is such a great tool for beginning to write. I am so glad they get to do this orally before they have to struggle with the mechanics of writing. Getting ones thoughts clear is such and important skill to have. Not only for writing but for basic good conversations with others. i count narration as I think about socialization skills etc.

It is still a great temptation for the little ones especially as they are not global thinkers to parrot back the information detail by detail. I think the open ended questions I have been asking after each narration  has helped. I do this because I watched a DVD of Eve Anderson a PNEU teacher who visited a CM school in Texas do this. She had pre-read the passage and thought of other information to add to it. She did not repeat information the children were to have retold but as one might do in a conversation she asked further questions about the information and added information that led to a wonderful discussion. I was a bit surprised as I have read that the teacher is not to interfere and she didn't she added more richness. I want to do this more too.

As we have been doing this the lessons which include narrations take on a different feel. They are less mechanical and more like a conversation aided on by help of the book. We add our thoughts about the passage and ask questions the passage brought up in us and we learned out loud you might say what the book is telling us. None of us are experts though I know more than they do they have good insights and I love giving them the chance to express them, question them and hear insights of others. I think this sort of dialogue makes the books more interesting and while they are interested they are learning to learn from a book and also to think about what is said. They get to participate. I also keep a good handle on etiquette for narrating and responding. They practice waiting ones turn, interrupting politely etc. so they participate with a measure of self control. All great skills for future conversations with others as well.

Geography: We are enjoying Our Little Athenian Cousin this week, also from the Yesterday's Classics Kindle package.

Aesop's Copy Work:

The paper Mache' armor has been put on hold as our original designs are not working. So after the holidays I think we will try again using some plans and ideas from this website, storm the castle.

Science Bird Study: This week we completed reading Blacky the Crow by Thornton Burgess and  have begun to read The Tale of Reddy Woodpecker by Arthur Scott Bailey. I am so pleased with these books. The stories are giving them more than just information about birds but more than that they instill a sort of reverence for living things and practical ways to care and respect them. In Blacky the crow Farmer brown's boy discovers a hunters duck blind near the big river. he discovers it is not only a blond but that the hunter has been baiting the ducks to come to this part of the river just before his blind with corn. Each afternoon he has been spreading the corn then after a few days and the ducks sense no danger he waits for them with a gun. Farmer brown's boy is outraged and decides he must do something to stop this unfair kind of hunting and devises a plan of his own. You will have to read the story to see just what he does. teaches the boys some right and wrong ways of dealing with the little feathered folk in our lives. I am loving reading these to them each day. :)

I found a fun website with patterns for making felt bird ornaments. All of the birds she has patterns for are well done and very close to realistic. Not to mention a great way for a beginning hand sewer to begin as the projects are small and can be completed in about 30 mins to an hour. We began with the robin and each of the boys has selected another bird to do next, results next week.

Nature Notebook: This week we stayed inside to learn to draw a cardinal and read a little from A pocketful of pinecones.

TJ drawing his cardinal and the photo of a cardinal in the background from DK Bird the Definitive visual guide.

Max is drawing his cardinal.

Max's final drawing and the drawing steps he used to draw the cardinal.

Language arts: This week was spent entirely on dictation. This is no longer their favorite lesson. I have decided to begin stretching them in this skill and have been dictating the whole sentence only once instead of dictating word by word. I also challenged them more so after dictating each sentence once I  then dictated all three at once. They did very well and on their first try they missed only one word each, but it was nerve racking for them to try it. Zak just about hyperventilated himself onto the floor. :)

Reading aloud still in our Elson reader book three.

Bedtime read aloud: We are again celebrating another Christmas with Laura and Mary, Pa, Ma and little Carrie and now baby Grace in On the Shores of Silver Lake. It fits nicely into our Christmas time readings.

Latin: We completed out letters written in Latin last week but not or rings and seals. So now our project is complete. Below is TJ's Letter to his grandma in Oregon. We sent her and Grandpa this note to see if they could dicipher it and they did! I am so amazed...so were the boys.

The directions for making these was in the Minimus Teacher's guide. I enjoyed having time to do some hands on projects without missing any of the good mid food in our daily readings and narrations. Perhaps we are discovering a way to fit them in after all. :)

Art/Music: We completed I Can Do All Things Drawing Lessons #11-14 drawing ellipses. And we are still enjoying reading about Fredrick Chopin and hearing his music.

Handicrafts:

Max's Felt frog on His felt pillow.

TJ's felt travel pillows.

Hope your week has been a good one!

Week Ten Wrap-Up

Bible: Ephesians with my dh.

Stories of Faith: We took a little break from The Adventures of Missionary Heroism this week and next so we can read The Stories of the Pilgrims by Margaret B. Pumphrey in celebration of Thanksgiving next Thursday.

Mathematics: We completed our times table lessons according the CM prescribed method found in Mathematics the Instrument of Living Teaching. The method has worked well for each of the boys. prior to the lessons when they recited story problems they were still figuring it out. Now, they spout off the answer as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Next week we will move along to something else that will further this acquisition of knowledge and sink init still deeper.

We read about Mary Fairfax Somerville from Mathematicians are People Too Vol. 2 on project day.

History of Ancient Greece: We read about Solon, Aristides, Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles from the Children's Plutarch by FJ Gould. Max was particularly impressed with Cimon for he was so generous to the poor.

Aesop's Copy work:

History Project: We are beginning what will soon be a rather long project of making paper mache' weapons and armor. We began this week by first choosing whether we were going to make roman or greek armor and weapons. Then we built the cardboard armatures for each of the pieces. Next week we will begin to applying paper mache'

Our rough materials

Their inspiration

Science Birds: We completed our reading of The Tale of Bobby Bobolink by Arthur Scott Bailey and began to read The Tale of Jolly Robin by the same author.

Nature Journals: My dh has purchased ten chicks to raise into laying hens. Now they are our subjects for nature study.

Pocket Full of Pinecones: We read six chapters this week as they are somewhat short and the boys are loving the story. We do not narrate this book we just listen and enjoy it.

Language Arts: We spent four of the five days this week on dictation from Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl. I am not yet happy with our current approach to it for there is al lot of anxiety on the part f the boys. So I am re thinking how we go about this lesson and hope to try something different next time this comes around.

Currently I have them copy the sentence we are about to dictate three times. Then they look at the sentence and visualize the harder words. This usually takes about 5-10 minutes if they all get to work right away. Then I dictate the sentence one word at a time. I read the whole sentence back to them and they check their work. Then with pens down they self check their sentence to see if it is correct. If there are mistakes more than one or two I have them rewrite the whole sentence, visualize the words and we do the dictation again. If it is one word or two they copy just that word a few times and visualize it before we go on.

The difficulty seems to be that they do not yet know how to teach themselves the sentence. Inevitably they think they know it until the dictation and then there are often tears. Earlier on when the sentences were easier they loved this exercise. Now I will need to do something so they begin to teach themselves the new words successfully.

We also did an observation/composition exercise on trees. This they found enjoyable. They still marvel that answering questions in a full sentence can add up to a short composition. I love it!

Evening reading: We are half way through Sea Star by Marguerite Henry. Our evening readings are not narrated and simply for enjoyment.

Latin: First day of this week I had the boys highlight all the verbs in the dialogue from our Minimus Latin Book. Then I reintroduced the -o ending and the -t ending. Then I introduced the -nt ending used for "they". They found it fun to discover that they had not noticed the -t and -nt difference. They were delighted to have it pointed out. I used inductive questions to led them to the discovery and it is working very well. :)

The rest of the week was spent learning a new dialogue.

Art: We began our drawing lesson with a practice drawing sheet from Art Projects from Kids. The boys had not done a drawing lesson since last year and thus did not know that they could do better this year. They were so encouraged with the results of the drawing sheets for they could clearly see how much easier they found it this time as opposed to last time. We practiced drawing laces on shoes and Wally the worm and his family.

Max's drawing of my hiker.

Music: We are wrapping up Tchaikovsky this week. To complete our study of this fascinating composer we listened to Symphony No. 1 in G minor and drew what we imagined onto a music appreciation notebook page as we listened.

We filled in the composer info in our composer lap book.

We Placed Tchaikovsky onto our timeline.

Have a great week end!