What a week! I am really thankful that I can sit down at the end of it all and go over what has happened, evaluate where the time went, where I need to improve, what we accomplished and learned!
I think I may have learned more this week than anyone else. The main thing I learned is I need to slow down the pace a bit, stop pushing them just to get through the lesson, take a breather if it’s getting difficult, have some grace! In light of that, I am taking more time with our math lessons, as needed, which may take us full circle in a year with The Boy, but I’m ok with that. It is more important that he have a mother who loves him and is patient with him, who can take the time to minister to his heart and his spiritual needs – for everyone to have this.
We begin our day with family devos with dad, before he goes to work, then bible study with breakfast. I am really liking our Pearables: The Narrow Way Character studies. We have been learning about faith – lessness, fulness, in God vs. man, and building concept upon concept, it is a great way to do it!
We learned, or tried to learn, Roman Numerals in Grade 2 Math for The Boy – which is actually very important for teaching place value! Go figure! I never could figure out the Roman numerals, so this was especially interesting for me. We also played lots of “Corners”, to teach mental adding by 5s and 10s.
JJ (SK/K5) continued with identifying groups of numbers, learning how they look as sets, rather than counting out.
Reading – my favourite part of the day! The Boy read through a bunch more Nate the Great books from the library – I think we may be ready to move on :D
I found a sets of good comprehension questions for a couple of the books (Nate the Great and the Big Sniff – scroll down the page – Monster Mess) and made up my own for others. We are also learning the importance of narration and putting that into more practice.
Keekers likes to D.E.A.R. (drop everything and read) – most often upside down and backwards. And she makes up her own stories!
We’re on to Thornton Burgess’ “The Adventures of Mr. Mocker” – and a friend from our church has offered to loan us a box full of more Thornton Burgess books! Huzzah! We are also reading through Fifty Famous Stories Retold, a couple (or more if the boys can twist our arms :D) each evening. I really enjoy these because it gives some history and always has a good moral and talks about some great character traits.
We finally added in our science last week, Apologia’s Land Animals of the 6th Day. Last year we did Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day, and since we have one more year on our zoo pass, I decided to skip sea creatures until next year. I tell you, they have been just chomping at the bit to get on it! This week was an intro, we learned about zoologists, habituation (accustoming animals in the wild to your presence so you can study them) and some animal careers. JJ wants to work at a race track, The Boy would like to be a veterinarian. Boys after my own heart! I wanted to be a vet for the longest time growing up, until I learned you needed to at least LIKE chemistry. So I switched to just plain loving horses. :D I absolutely DEVOURED Lauraine Snelling’s “Golden Filly” series, such great books, and my mom just dropped them off here for Keekers – when she is a lot older of course.
Taking a break from BFIAR, we have been using Homeschool Creation’s “Fall Fun Learning Pack” – JJ and Keekers have enjoyed colouring in all of the leaves (we print B&W), lots of cutting and puzzling, tracing letters A (for apple) and P (for pumpkin).
Keekers even traced a perfect lowercase a! Notice the left hand?
Since this is our Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend, we are planning on heading out on a leaf hunt to classify different leaves and make some fun crafts.
Handwriting without Tears hasn’t been happening, yike, I need to get back on that! They’ve enjoyed playing with the wood pieces but it is time now to move on to formation of letters. They can all write, except of course Keekers, but we need some definite improvement! I have noticed a lot already just in getting The Boy back into a good routine of writing.
We did a LOT of arts and crafts this week – my version anyway – cutting paper and pasting, and LOADS of drawing.
The boys were so fascinated with the idea of careers with horses that they of course wanted to learn to draw horses, so I scrounged up a few good drawing steps and away they went!
All in all, despite all the difficulties and challenges, we’ve had a great week, with beautiful weather (which definitely makes it hard to get work done!) and I’m looking forward to a long weekend ahead :D
I’m linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap Up and Granola Mom 4 God Elementary Round-up.
