Homeschool Discoveries

I think I may have discovered a new axiom of homeschooling (at least for us, this week): If nothing else is planned for the day, school (or at least finishing school for the day) can and will expand to fill the time allowed for it.  On Monday/Wednesday/Friday when we had no specific afternoon plans, we really didn’t get everyone’s work done until mid to late afternoon.  On Tuesday and Thursday when we had someplace to be right after lunch (gymnastics class and our co-op, respectively)…low and behold, work was done quickly and efficiently.  I guess I need to find some better motivators for the days we don’t plan to leave the house…or better incentives to not get distracted.  🙂

Here are a few highlights of what we accomplished this week for school:

Miss M (Age 8, 3rd grade):

Math: It must be a record for us — we completed six lessons of RightStart C (#s 131-136).  Miss M loves fractions, but thinks pages of multiplication are the equivalent of a medieval torture device.  😉

Spelling:  We completed lesson 12 in Logic of English Essentials, with Miss M asking to test in the middle of the week, and we also started lesson 13.  I am really liking the Logic of English Spelling Journal.  This week I tried combining it with the spelling lists by phonogram I discovered on the LOE site.  On two occasions this week I copied a list from the site (-tch words and -kn words) and asked her to read the whole list and circle any words she did not know the meaning of.  Then I had her copy ten or so words in the spelling journal.  I think this was a good exercise for her.  My intention had been to do dictionary practice on Friday with the words she didn’t know from the two lists, but we didn’t quite get to that!

History: We’re finishing up with colonial America.  We finished Witch of Blackbird Pond as well as finally finishing Struggle for a Continent by the Maestros, and reading a few chapters of Sign of the Beaver.  Miss M has been reading “Fire by Night”, a historical fiction work from an out-of-print series of chapter books called “The American Adventure”.    We’re excited to move on to the Revolutionary War this coming week!

Science: Miss M read Ch. 4 in Sassafrass Science Zoology and learned about the desert habitat and animals through the assigned chapter and supplementary readings.  I want to to the lesson on Rocks and Minerals from BFSU with the kids, but I keep forgetting to get my act together and order rock and mineral sample sets.

Mr E (age 5.5, Kindergarten):

Math: We worked on the material in lessons 30-31 of RightStart B on Monday, and made it through lesson 35 by the end of the week.  We didn’t linger on most of these lessons, allowing time to also work on pages from Singapore 1A and Challenging Word Problems 1.  In an ideal world we would play more RS math games, but he likes the workbook style problems too, so it works out well for the mean time to do this.

Phonics/Spelling: Mr E read from “I See Sam” books and another series called “My Phonics Readers”.   He finished up lesson 2 of Logic of English Essentials (we’re not doing the grammar portion at all, just the spelling).   We also tried out Explode the Code book 3, since he seems to like workbook-based activities.

Handwriting:  Six weeks or so ago, Mr. E though that “A Reason for Handwriting Book A” looked too hard.  This week, he thought it looked too easy.  LOL!  He really wanted to jump right into copying verses, and copied two this week, as well as asking me to help him spell a variety of statements about God that he wanted to write out for himself.  And he asked to start learning cursive.  We’ll see how that goes!

History and Science:  Mr E listened to Sign of the Beaver, and the boys picked lots and lots of science-related library books to read this week about deserts and about space!

Mr. K (3.5, Preschool):

Mr K likes to listen in on most of what Mr. E is doing.  He also started asking me to “do math”, so we are having a special math time together most weeks while the two bigger kids are in their gymnastics class.  Having done math the “RightStart way” for a few years, it’s pretty easy to just wing it and start teaching him some of the basic concepts without even referring to the level A lessons.

All together…The kids watched some of the new complete School House Rock video I bought them.  That counts for grammar, math, science, history…right? 🙂  They also enjoyed three more episodes of the PBS show SciGirls!

And for the fun stuff:

1-2:  Lego Fun, including a boat inspired by last week’s trip to The Works.

3:  Look where I can scoot under! (Yes we have an old-style crib…we zip-tied the sides so that the drop-side is secure!).  🙂

4:  More leafy fun this week…though most of our leaves have blown away!

5-6: The kids made more Halloween crafts of their own inititative

7: Enjoying a new stack of library books!

8.  My handsome boys on co-op picture day.  Miss M didn’t really want to pose for me!

9. Painting a model canon from a kit

I hope you’ve had a good weekend and are ready to face another week! Tony left this morning for a short work trip, so I am brainstorming about how to keep the next few days fun and interesting!

Linking up with Collage Friday and the Weekly Wrap Up!