learning together: W16Y01 and Y0

tax season! tax season! this means i'm gonna give you a rundown of week 16 as quickly as possible.  if you noticed, i added year 0 to the title for gibson.  he has been so responsive to learning letters and doing copywork these past weeks that i think it's time we make it "official."

you can go here to find out what year 0 is all about, and here to check out the booklist. we've read many of the books on this list (though there are still more we have yet to read), and all the kids enjoy listening to the stories.

bible:

we read 1 samuel 31 and emma tried her hand at a crossword puzzle (lesson 81 from the calvary curriculum site) for the first time.

our scripture memory verse was john 3:16.  this was easy-peasy for emma since we've had this as our memory verse before.  but reviewing it was nice, because it gave gibson a chance to try and memorize it.  we also watched the rizers video for this particular verse and the kids liked it a lot.

french:

the kids watched lessons 1-3 from youlearnfrench on youtube.  bonjour!

language arts:

copywork for emma was our memory verse for 1 day and an excerpt from the poem us two by a. a. milne for 2 days.

we went through mcguffey lessons 57 and 60.

spelling words this week were on, ox, lot, got and snot (this one got a laugh).  we only spent 3 days on these words.

similar to emma's letter of the month when she was younger, i will be doing a letter a week for gibson.  all of his activity sheets pertaining to that letter will be kept in a folder for easy access, and to allow him to work independently if he chooses to.

this week we did the letter g (i plan on going through all the letters in his name).  i'm primarily using these sites to put his folder together: tot school printables (also for cash when he wants to join in), raising rockstars and homeschool creations.

he has been so into doing his own school and wanting to trace and learn his letters.  i love it. and i'm thankful that this transition was low-key and painless (which i think it should be).  it was just 6 months (or so) ago that he was uninterested in learning letters or numbers...it's funny to see the change.

math:

we are almost done with the life of fred book so we only did one chapter (17)  this week to stretch it out longer.

history:

we read hengist's treachery from our island story.  new vocab word: treachery.  i forgot to read inchcape rock from fifty famous stories so that will have to be tacked on to week 17.

art and music study were the same as last week's.

literature:

we read the leap at rhodes and the wild boar and the fox from the aesop for children.  the kids listened to the sing-song of old man kangaroo from just so stories.  from beautiful stories from shakespeare we read as you like it.

we didn't read any poems from a. a. milne's book because emma had misplaced it somewhere.  we found it in the car hidden underneath a bunch of stuff on sunday.  yay!

science/nature study:

mammal of the week was a pig.  we read over some brief information about domestic and wild pigs, and emma drew her rendition of a domesticated piggy.  oink, oink.

we read peter learns something about spooky from the burgess bird book, and looked up some information about screech owls.  we listened to their sound and watched a couple of short video clips on them.

life skill:

emma continues to be a natural helper (for the most part) around the house.  she has been promoted to putting away the clean plates from the dishwasher so that gibson can take over her old job of putting away utensils.  now i just have to make sure to give them more opportunities to practice their new skills.

other things:

it snowed last week so the kids had some time enjoying the snow.

inside the kids busied themselves with books, games, and playing together and independently.

cash has been wanting to join in the table work fun, so i've been giving him his own sheet to complete. i think he is quite proud of his work.

more next week!  a bientot!

learning together: W15Y01

so it looks like the next few weekly updates are going to have to be a condensed version.  i'm preparing to do our tax return, and it is impossible to do that and maintain these updates on top of all the other stuff we have going.  i also like to have a clean home and clean clothes to wear every once in a while, so it's time for me to prioritize, friends.  once our tax returns are done, there will be plenty of words added back to these posts.

but before i start, let me just say our week started off like this...

bible:

we read through 1 samuel 23:14-24:22.  our memory verse for the week was from psalm 25:4-5.

french:

we went through youlearnfrench lessons 1-3.  it was very cute listening to the kids repeating back the words in french.

language arts:

emma did 3 days of copywork from our memory verse. spelling words for the week were is, sip, tip, lip, slip.  we only did them for 3 days.  in mcguffey's first reader we did lessons 47 and 55.

gibson did his own "copywork" again.  i think i'll probably start him on a little bit of daily table work pretty soon.  he seems ready for it (as long as it's not too long).

i cannot recall what she did for her free reading...she read a whole lot of books though.  a.lot.

math:

we did life of fred chapters 15 and 16.

we had a good discussion on pricing products, which stemmed from her plans of opening up a shop where she was going to sell bookmarks.  we discussed how to price items in groups versus just a single item.

we also had a brief discussion on sale and clearance prices during our trip to target, and why stores do that.

history:

we read whitington and his cat from fifty famous stories retold over the course of 2 days.

emma worked on her timeline and we are caught up to week 14.

art study:

jacob van ruisdael's view of haarlem with bleaching grounds, circa 1665.

music appreciation:

we're still on passion of st. matthew, and i still can't get into this one...pretty intense and lengthy piece of work.

geography:

no paddle again, but as emma was doing her timeline we used the atlas to locate some of the countries mentioned.

literature:

we read the ass and the load of salt and the lion and the gnat from the aesop for children.  then we read prince hyacinth and the dear little princess from the blue fairy book, which i spread out over two days.

science/nature study:

the mammal of the week was a horse.  emma filled out the basic information sheet, which listed the horse's habitat, diet and an interesting fact (or facts), and did her best drawing of a horse in her nature journal.

life skill:

i had her address a package i am planning to send out to salty not sweet.  now we just have to purchase postage and stick it in the mail.

other things:

there was snow this week, so the kids played in it quite a few times.

the boys and emma built themselves a "house" in the corner of the dining room.  they shoved that house full of stuff...all essential things for the home, of course.

the older two continue to do well in habitually taking their plates to the kitchen once they're done eating.  i have even caught cash putting his cup in the sink once he's done with it.  clean up after play has been going well too, and it's nice to see them working together as a team to get it done.  i'm highlighting these things in this post, because i feel that these are important habits to develop which will be helpful for them down the road as they get older.

the boys found the jar of coins and really enjoyed dumping them out and putting them back in.  i did some coin ID with gibson while he was putting them back in the jar, but it didn't last too long.

that's it from our schoolhouse!

learning together: W14Y01

did i already say how nice it feels to get back into our routine?  AND we bought more black printer ink (thanks, ibu for the staples gift card) so that we can continue forward with our art study for week 15.  yeah!

bible:

we read through 1 Samuel 20 over the course of a few days, using lesson 80 from the calvary curriculum site.  both gibson and emma did the coloring sheet, and emma did the fill-in-the blank sheet at the end of the week.  in case anyone cares, we use the esv translation for reading the passages.  the kids do quite well following along, though we do need to stop after about 10-20 verses and have emma (or sometimes it's me) narrate. 

our memory verse for the week was from deuteronomy 31:6.  now that gibson is in the same class as emma on sunday (sniff, sniff...my boy is getting big), we have been reciting it orally more often than usual.  i like that, since it helps memorize the scripture too.

french:

we will be using this free site i came across to learn some basic french.  i like that it's just audio, but it does show the words/phrases used on the screen.  since emma can read already, she is able to see the word while hearing it being pronounced at the same time.  we went through lesson 3 for the week, and then i tried using some of the words and phrases here and there through out the week.

language arts:

for copywork, we did 2 days of our memory verse and 1 day of the poem a thought by a.a. milne (it would have been 2 days, but the printer ran out of ink).

we went through lessons 40 and 41 in mcguffey and discussed some sight words, words that have "ight," "ould,"and how to add "ing" to words like "bike," "hike," etc..  i think i'll be skipping quite a bit ahead for the next few weeks and finish out this book.  i'd like to move on the the second reader soon.

spelling words for the week were sent, went, melt, felt, and belt.  emma did well spelling out the words so we only did 4 days of practice.  i've been using each of the words in a sentence, and emma and gibson will occasionally join in and do their own versions. 

science/nature study:

our mammal for the week was a squirrel.  we didn't do anything too fancy-schmancy with our mammal.  i printed out a simple fact sheet i made up on the computer (i'll have to post it in case anyone cares to use it too) so that she could record some basic information she gathered about squirrels.  we also watched a couple of videos on squirrels.  one was about the flying squirrel and the other was about a white squirrel (i can't find the one we watched for some reason).

i found a few pictures of squirrels on my phone to help emma draw a picture of one in her nature journal.  she finally decided on one of a red squirrel.  we also talked about the squirrels that we've seen in our backyard, and she came to the conclusion that those ones were more likely gray squirrels than the red variety.

math:

we did fred chapters 13 and 14 this week.  i am drawing a blank at what we read through right now...i know there was adding two numbers to make 9 and discussion on orthogonal lines, but i can't remember what else!  i do know that we didn't need to supplement on anything since emma did well with the lessons.

history:

we had a lot of history reading this week, but i finally managed to sort of catch up on the timeline.  i finally got up to week 13 finished and all we have to do is cut and paste in emma's timeline/book of centuries.

we read the story of the coming of hengist and horsa from our island story.  it tells about vortigern (who was now king of the britons) calling on the germans for help and the arrival of the saxons around 400 AD.  i thought this story was a bit more challenging for emma to narrate.  i think it may be due to the story itself.  personally, it was not one of the more exciting stories we've read so even i didn't retain a whole lot of it either.

we read the black douglas from fifty famous stories retold.  that one was a bit more exciting, and told the story of james douglas, a good friend of robert the bruce.  narration was much easier for emma after this one, although i did break it up into 2 chunks to make it more digestible :).

last, we read about athanasius from trial and triumph.  this one was a good story, but another challenging narration.  i did have her do short narrations after a few paragraphs or so, but for some reason it was still challenging for her to narrate parts of it.  maybe the interest level of this particular story was just not there (much like hengist and horsa)?

art study:

we did another week of Ruisdael's Two Watermills.  I had planned on doing a painting project with an outlined drawing of his work, but alas the printer was out of black ink!

music appreciation:

this week we listened to part of Bach's Passion of St. Matthew.  i like classical music, but DANG!  this one's a long one.  we listened to part one and it was an hour long!  played it mostly during eating and play times, but because of the length i don't know that the kids heard all parts of part one.  no matter though, we are planning to stay with this piece for the next 4 weeks so they'll be hearing it a lot.

in other music news, we went to guitar center and the kids had fun trying out the drums and pianos.  emma tried to figure out how to play twinkle, twinkle little star after i showed her where middle c was.

geography:

no paddle this week, but we did use our new atlas to look at some of the locations from our history stories.  afterward, emma went off and read through the book on her own and told me a few tidbits of information she gathered from her reading.  i count that as a good week in geography!

literature:

we read the elephant child from just so stories.  for some reason, the kids kept giggling every time the elephant got spanked, which was a lot.  i had emma do a drawing of what she read for her narration.  the girl likes to draw, but when she's not into it she does a rush job and sacrifices quality.  oh well...i guess she prefers talking (that doesn't surprise me).

from the aesop for children we read a raven and a swan and the two goats.  these were nice and short and narration went very well.

she had some free reading on friday (though she does read on her own everyday), and i had her narrate after she was done reading.  she chose to read the sandman from our hans christian anderson fairy tale book. she read many other books through out the week - ones that she's read before. the ones that i noticed in particular were her magic tree house books.  i think that girl has re-read those books at least 3-4 times since she got them last month.

other things:

we went out again on friday to do some bike riding (emma and gibson) and a stroll around the block.  it was cold, but sunny so the time out wasn't so bad.

emma offered to wash the dishes for me everyday.  isn't that sweet?  except it lasted one day.  haha.  i've been trying to focus on keeping neat, organized rooms for the older two this week.  they do pretty good at picking up after themselves downstairs (even cash is a champ at cleaning up...he's very detail oriented), but not as much when it comes to their rooms.  ideally, i'd like to have them develop a habit of picking up and straightening up their rooms on a daily basis. not anything time consuming, just spending 5 minutes to straighten up in the morning and after nap/quiet time so that the mess doesn't pile up and get overwhelming (which is kind of where we are at right now).

gibson did a few copywork sheets again like last week.  he's doing pretty good as long as he doesn't have to sit in one place for longer than 10 minutes.  he is one active dude!

on one of the days, i found the oldest two busy working on dragon land.  almost every sticker on the page had a background story to go with it.  they had quite a time riding around the house on their broom horses.  gibson, especially, was on a knight/warrior dude kick last week, and decked himself out with his shield, battle axe, helmet and his broom horse.

i think that's about it for week 14.

learning together: W13Y01

school is "back in session!"  here's our AO learning round-up from last week...

bible:

we studied 1 samuel 17:1-52, using some of the activity sheets from calvary curriculum.  we are using the memory verse assigned to the kids from sunday school, so for week 13 we did isaiah 41:10.

french:

we did a brief review of greetings, what is your name, and how are you?  i had to return the french book we were using back to the library, and i'm not quite sure if i want to continue using that or just working on a simple phrase a week.

language arts:

emma did 2 days of copywork using the week's memory verse and 1 day of copywork using an excerpt from the poem now we are six by a.a. milne.

gibson has expressed more interest in doing his own "copywork" these last few months, and this week requested 3 (not all in one day).  i just print out preschool handwriting practice sheets for him to do. he likes the ones on here (especially the football ones) and i've done a few from here too.  he is loving it, as long as he doesn't have to sit for longer than 10 minutes.  ha!

we went through lessons 38 and 39 in mcguffey's first eclectic reader.  i'm considering skipping more towards the end of this book after week 14 because it's still so easy for her to read.  she is getting better at slowing down her reading though.  the other option is just jumping to the next book (second eclectic reader).  she's really very much like me when it comes to reading stuff, especially when it's very exciting.  i tend to skim and skip words so that i can get to the end :).  while i suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes you can miss out on the full effects of what you're reading (errr, does that even make sense?).  sometimes, you aren't able to fully digest the content and experience all the glorious words (and the pictures they help form in your head) when you read too fast...at least that's my personal experience.

emma got the first 4 books from the magic treehouse series (thanks, auntie michelle) which were devoured within a few days.  but thankfully, she likes re-reading them so she's been reading them over and over and over again.  that's pretty much what she's been reading during her independent reading time.  i have her narrate the story to me for each book she completes, and she seems to have a good grasp on the story.  we ended up getting her book 5 and a fact book to complement book 1.  she was halfway done with book 5 before we even paid for the book and finished it on the way home.  i don't even know why we bought it!

history:

we read vortigern and king constans from our island story and bruce and the spider from fifty famous stories.  it seems like we've moved on from roman history and into british history now.  now here's a cool homeschool moment: bruce and the spider is about robert the bruce, the first king of scotland.  we did a scotland lapbook a while back as part of teaching emma some of her family heritage.  she recognized the name immediately.  also, aaron's side of the family comes from the line (somewhere) of robert the bruce.  that is why her pap is named robert bruce, and why daddy's kilt uses the bruce tartan. we talked briefly about scottish clans (our family would be part of the bruce clan) and differing tartans based on which clan you were part of.  i absolutely love these little connections.  it's so cool!

i am SO behind on making up the timeline sheets for emma's history timeline folder.  i'm almost caught up and hoping that we can put all of them in this week.

we also watched an episode from a show called scotland revealed on youtube.  there are 4 episodes, except that when we went to watch another one on a different day we couldn't view it anymore.  sad.

art study:

following AO's schedule, the artist for this term is jacob van ruisdael.  we are observing two watermills and an open sluice at singraven for weeks 13 and 14.  i made a little bio sheet of the artist, which i'll try and share on here for week 14.

music appreciation:

this term's composer is johann sebastian bach.  the week's music selection was brandenburg concerto no. 2 in f major.  nothing fancy with music appreciation except for listening to it.  i usually tried to play it at least twice a day...mostly during play time or meal time.  i forgot how much i like bach.

geography:

we read chapter 12 in paddle.  he has finally reached the end of lake superior.  the chapter had commercial fishermen in the story so we went in search of a couple of videos of commercial fishermen in action.  we also found a video on how to clean a fish (also talked about in the chapter).  that was very interesting...good to know if i ever want to clean my own fish!

literature:

we read the ants and the grasshopper and the ass carrying the image from the aesop for children.  they were quite short and narration for them were very easy for emma.  i went over again how the word ass was a common word back in the old days for donkey, but that it's now used as a bad word.  i just don't want her to be going around calling people asses thinking that she's calling them donkeys...haha.

we read beauty and the beast from the blue fairy book, which was quite a lengthy story.  we spread the story out over 2 days, and narration was about every paragraph or so.  she didn't do too bad on narration, despite the high vocabulary used.  but i think it does help to have her narrate every couple of paragraphs.  she loved the story, and i loved her reaction when she found out that the prince in beauty's dream was actually the beast.  i guess she didn't see that coming.

math:

we did chapter 12 in fred.  this lesson covered a dozen, numbers that add to 9, and right angles.  it was pretty straight forward, so we didn't do any supplementing the rest of the week.

science/nature study:

we got james herriot's treasury for children for christmas (thanks, ibu and grandpa!) and read bonny's big day.  emma has already read through many of the stories in the book when we first got it, but since we're following AO's reading schedule we are sticking to their reading plan.  plus, she doesn't having mama read her some of the stories, and i like being able to read them too.

term 2 animal study is on mammals, so we are planning to pick a mammal a week to study...starting week 14.

poetry:

this term we will be using a.a. milne's when we were very young and now we are six.  emma got this book for christmas last year, so we didn't have to purchase this book for the school year.  i can't remember all the poems we read, but one was brian botany.  gibson picked that one out in particular because the dude has a battle axe.  haha.

other things:

we had a dry day and warm(er) day on thursday so we took a nice stroll around the block.  emma and gibson rode their bikes and cash walked the whole time.  i was very impressed (we have very long blocks in our neighborhood). 

emma has been busy making bookmarks to sell for her shop.  there have been a lot of strips of construction paper with fancy designs on them laying about the house in piles.

the boys have been fighting over playing with their new wooden trains and cars quite a bit.  they've also put together a few puzzles.  well, cash tries to put pieces together, but still needs help finding ones that actually fit.

leilani has rolled over here and there and is generally a content little girl.  she likes to sit through stories sometimes, and really likes when mommy holds and rocks her to sleep.

everyone has been learning and it feels good to be back into our routine...my brain feels a little less frazzled.

learning together: W10Y01

argh! i'm two weeks behind!  time for some catch-up.  we finished week 10 in our AO year 1 curriculum 2 weeks ago.

literature:

last week we read the travelers and the purse and the lion and the [ahem] ass (that was a nice discussion on the history and current usage of that particular word) from the aesop for children.  the narrations for both went quite well.

we read more poems from a child's garden of verses.  many were repeats of ones we've read in weeks past-the kids have their favorites!

language arts:

spelling words for last week were hid, lid, sip rip and trip.  we spent four days on the words.

we went through lessens 32 and 33 in the mcguffey first reader.  we talked about syllables and she practiced finding one and two syllable words from her reading.

for copywork she used her memory verse from sunday school (3 days) and an excerpt from the poem the gardener by robert louis stevenson.  gibson also did his own copywork again this week.  i love that he's been getting into more table work stuff.

independent reading:

emma was very into reading some of the stories in the hans christian andersen fairy tales book (it was mine and my sisters' when we were little).  she spent the week reading the snow queen, the tinderbox and the shepherdess and the chimney sweep.  i will say that it has been nice to own a good fairy tale book, and one with language that hasn't been "dumbed" down for kids.  eventually, i'd like to acquire another one full of the brothers grimm's fairy tales.
bible and scripture memorization:

we read through and discussed 1 samuel 14:1-46 this week.  our memory verse was the second part of matthew 10:8.

math:

we completed chapter 10 in life of fred.  questions at the end of the chapter covered problem solving exercises for numbers that added to 9 and total nickels needed to make 45 cents, an addition problem and reinforcing days of the week.

a couple of times during the week, she took out the measuring tape to measure various objects (and people) around the house.  this was just something she was interested in doing on her own, which was cool :).

history:

we listened to the audio reading of king alfred and the beggar from fifty famous stories.  she did okay for the narration.  the downside to the audio readings is that sometimes it's hard for me to pay attention to the whole story so i don't always know the whole story.  maybe i should be doing narration exercises too.  ha!

we worked on her benjamin franklin lapbook the rest of the week.  it was nice to be able to gather some of the information we learned in the book and break it down in chunks.  there's a lot to know about ben!  i'll have to share the specifics on the lapbook in a different post.

handicraft/life skill:

more breakfast prep awesomeness!  she made toast for herself and her siblings one of the days.  another day she doctored up some leftover pumpkin pancakes (after i heated them up for her).

we took a short trip to a nearby grocery store.  we talked about the basics of money management after they asked to buy a few extra items that were not on the list: while sometimes mom and dad will pick up an extra non-list item as a treat, we can't do that all the time or we will quickly go over our budget and run out of money.


folk song:

we moved on from hymn study to learning and listening to a new folk song each week.  for week 10 we listened to gypsy rover (or also known as the whistling gypsy).  i'm not quite certain of the origin.  some sources say english while others say irish.  anyone know for sure?  this one didn't interest the kids much for some reason.  maybe it was too slow for them?  or maybe they just couldn't relate to the words?

geography:

we read chapter 9 in paddle.  he was stuck in a marsh in this chapter so there wasn't a whole lot of action.  we did identify some of the animals pictured in the book and went over the names of the great lakes.

art:

we did not study a new piece from camille pissaro's work, because our printer is running low on ink (again!).  but i did turn his the market at gisor into an outline picture for emma and gibson to color in.  we used oil pastels and they were encouraged to try and mimic the colors in the original work.

emma also did plenty of self-initiated paper art (many paper chains and little collages from construction paper) while gibson enjoyed wielding the scissors to "make stuff" out of paper.  cash has recently shown more interest when big brother and sister are crafting so he's gotten his fair share of crayons, colored pencils and stickers.  these crafting moments don't last long with him though.  before long the box of crayons have usually been dumped out or he's using the colored pencils for drumsticks.

science/nature study:

we read peter discovers two old friends from the burgess bird book for children.  afterward, the kids looked through the bird cards (i made them from here)to find all the birds mentioned in the story.

emma caught a bug inside the house and put it into her gibson's bug box for observation.  i have no idea what it was since i've never seen that kind of bug inside our house before.  it looked like an ant with wings and orange stripes on the back of the abdomen.  it didn't look like a wasp but i have not been able to identify it.

there were a couple of other science related things we did but it ties in with the benjamin franklin lapbook so i'll save those for later.

other things:

emma got a little impromptu music lesson from her dad.  they played amazing grace together: dad on guitar and emma on the toy xylophone.  it sounded good pretty good.

ballet continues to be the highlight of emma's weekend.  she showed me some chasses which she learned in class this week.  and speaking of ballet, the kids requested that they watch the nutcracker on video.  how could i say no to ballet??  they like to act out the story with emma usually being clara and gibson as the nutcracker.  it's cute to watch.

learning together: W9Y01 review

we wrapped up week 9 last week.

language arts:

for spelling we had the words if, is, it, bit, lit.   she got the pattern pretty quickly so we only spent 3 days on spelling.

copywork was 3 days of her memory verse and 2 days from an excerpt of bed in summer.  gibson requested his own copywork a few times so i printed off a few tracing sheets for him.

we went through lessons 30 and 31 in the mcguffey reader.  all words she knew, but it gives her a chance to slow down and talk about some of the words she's read.

literature:

from the book beautiful stories from shakespeare, we listened to the audio version of the tempest.  i think she had a hard time grasping the whole story..."there was this big storm and this man and this girl were on a boat.  the man was the girl's dad and they went to this place and the daughter got married."  but i think she did a pretty good job narrating, don't you think?

we read the farmer and the stork and the sheep and the pig from the book the aesop for children. the aesop stories are usually pretty easy for her to narrate since they're short.  she seemed to particularly enjoy narrating the sheep and the pig...probably because the ending had the word "bacon" in it.  haha!

we read the story how the rhino got his skin from just so stories.  actually, we listened to the audio version and emma and gibson followed along in the book (since we own it already).  it gave me a nice break from reading so that i could do other things, and the kids were able to enjoy the pictures from the book while listening to the story.  narration was a little choppy for this one (possible because gibson kept trying to throw in his 2 cents worth), but she got the basic idea.

we read a few poems from a child's garden of verses.  i can't remember all of them but some were bed in summer, the gardener and marching song.

independent reading:

some of the books read included angelina and the princess, the berenstain bears media madness, greece, the beginners bible, and princess emily and the wishing star.

history:

we finished reading benjamin franklin.  we read 3-4 pages at a time and i had emma narrate after each reading sessions.  there's a lot of information in that book!  even i learned things i didn't know about ben.  we'll be working on a benjamin franklin lapbook week 10 to help gather all that information and put it in one spot.
 
we listened to the warrior queen from the book our island story.  we had already read that in week 8 but emma wanted to listen to the audio version (i guess she gets tired of hearing my voice sometimes...ha!).

we read the story of androclus and the lion from fifty famous stories retold.  side note: i downloaded this book (for free) on my kindle app (also free) for my phone and it's been fantastic to have!  emma really liked this story because of the sweet ending - androclus is reunited with his lion friend.  she did excellent job of narrating this particular story probably because she thought it was so sweet.

math:

i still haven't done much of what i had planned for math except for going through life of fred.  it seems to be enough and there doesn't seem to be a need to supplement with additional activities through out the rest of the week.

emma completed chapter 9 in fred with questions at the end addressing time telling, days of the week, counting by 5s (in nickels), using ordinal numbers and numbers that add to 9.  i think after this term ends, we'll probably do a chapter from fred 2-3 times a week instead of 1 time a week.

hymn:

we listened and tried to memorize "anywhere with jesus."  i found a youtube video of a vbs group doing this song with moves.  i think i had more fun doing the dance moves than the kids.  check it...


bible and scripture memorization:

we read through 1 samuel 9:1 - 12:25 where saul is annointed king of israel.  both emma and gibson colored a coloring sheet and we discussed the story together.

the memory verse for week 9 was from john 14:15.  it was a pretty short verse to memorize, though we also discussed the meaning of that verse, its context and how we can apply that practically.

geography:

we read chapter 9 in paddle to the sea in which grain elevators were mentioned.  we found a couple of videos on youtube of grain elevators doing their thing and talked about their purpose.

i still haven't gotten around to printing out a large sized map for the kids to trace paddle's journey.  i need to get on that!!


handiwork/life skill:

i taught her how to toast bread and she was able to prepare breakfast for herself and her brothers one morning.  oh man, was that awesome...for me.

emma and gibson also helped dad with the raking.  gibson came back in with a muddy face.  i think he had a great time out there.

french:

we didn't spend a whole lot of time on our language study this week.  we did listen to the CD that came along with the book a few times.  

other things:

it finally dried up a bit last week so we were able to spend some time outside.  there was some serious biking and running going on!

ballet has been going really well.  last week they got to dance in the dark with glow sticks and used the barre to do plies and tendus.  emma is very serious in class...at least when i peek in there.

emma was really into making paper bookmarks last week.  there were LOTS of colorful strips of paper. gibson was into doing his own "crafts" too which involved some papers stuck together with glue.

side note on narration: i came across a thread in the AO forums where parents were recording their kids' narrations and then transcribing them.  some of the narrations were pretty funny, and it made me feel better that some days emma's narrations are a bit off the mark.  i think i might have to try recording a few of hers.  it would be interesting to see the progression over the years.

learning together: W8Y01 review

week 8...let's get right to it, shall we?

literature:

we read 2 stories from the aesop for children: the gnat and the ox and the plane tree.  since both stories were quite short and emma was still engaged, we read both in one day instead of splitting them up over two days.  for the narration practice, i asked her to summarize the gnat story and whether or not the tree was indeed useful for the plane tree story.

this week, some of emma's books of choice for independent reading have been a tiara club series book, a junie b. jones series book, 100 things you should know about ancient rome, a nancy drew book, an angelina ballerina book, and big anthony and the magic ring by tomie depaola.

history:

on monday we read about cincinnatus from fifty famous stories retold.  the rest of the week was left open to start benjamin franklin by ingri d'aulaire, but wouldn't you know i didnt have the book ordered yet.  oops!  so we jumped ahead to week 9 and read about boadecia from our island story.

boadecia was a celtic warrior queen who fought against the roman invasion of britain.  the title of the story alone, the warrior queen, captured emma's attention.  ooooh!  a fighter queen!  the topics of revenge and suicide did come up during our reading, which caught me a bit off guard since i didn't read this story in advance.  but we had a great, in-depth discussion afterward about those subjects.

math:

we are in the second life of fred book (butterflies), and finished chapter 8 this week.  some of the topics covered in this chapter include counting by fives and ordinal numbers.  the practice problems were a mix of review from previous chapters and new topics introduced in chapter 8.

i didn't do a whole lot of supplementing this week since emma went through the practice problems easily.  the only thing we did was practice identifying u.s. coins and adding coins together.

bible:

right now we are going through 1 samuel.  this week we went through 1 samuel 3:1-20 (samuel is called) and 1 samuel 4:1-7:2 (the capture and return of the ark).  we use the curriculum from this site, but i don't always print out the activity sheets.  gibson likes to do the coloring sheet so sometimes i'll print that for him.  emma likes to alternate between the coloring sheet and the fill-in the blanks so we did that for this week.  other than that, we really just take some time after reading the scripture to simply talk about it.

for scripture memorization we currently use the weekly memory verse from the kids' sunday school.  it keeps things simple and streamlined that way.  this week's was from matthew 6:13.

language arts:

for daily copywork i used the memory verse emma needs to memorize for church.  not only is she practicing her handwriting, but it's also another way to help her memorize  the verse.  sometimes i'll add a few sentences from a poem we've read for variation, but i didn't get to that this week.

spelling words for this week were went, sent, spent, felt and melt.  by the third day of spelling review she had mastered the words so we bagged spelling practice for the remainder of the week.

we did lesson XXIX and XXX from mcguffey's first eclectic reader this week, and talked about how some words are spelled the same but pronounced differently (wind and wind) while other words sound the same but are spelled differently (fair and fare). the more i teach her about the english language, the more i see how difficult the language is to learn.  all those exceptions and grammatical rules...wow!

nature study:

we collected a few leaves and did some leaf rubbings.  gibson found a few sweet gum pods and took them home, while cash was quite content to gather a few leaves of his own.  the unseasonably warm weather was perfect for plenty of outside time, and the kids managed to return from our walk with some sort of leafy collection.

emma also managed to capture a moth while she was sweeping the leaves in the backyard.  the kids were enthralled by the little guy, and emma recorded her findings in her nature journal.

french:

we reviewed the phrases we've learned so far from this book (a great library find for us!) which included identifying family members, days of the week and simple greeting.

arty stuff:

in music we learned the hymn "for the beauty of the earth," and had fun singing it each day.  we discovered two different melodies for this hymn so we listened to both.

in visual art, we are still looking at camille pissaro's market at gisors rue de cappeville. we didn't get to using the oil pastels as i had originally planned but hopefully we can for week 9.  she did make a hot dog out of our leftover salt dough and she's waiting for it to dry before painting it.

ballet class has been coming right along.  she's learned first-third positions, demi plie and some basic stretches.  and of course her teacher also provides plenty of opportunities for creative dance.

that wraps up our week!