In our homeschool now -

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I’ve been so bad at getting back into blogging after our computer crash problem! My goal is to begin posting at least a couple of times a week again.

Here is what we’re working on in our homeschool right now. In history we’re studying Colonial Times. I found some notebooking pages for my 9 yo son and have a couple of lapbooks for my 7 yo son to choose activites from. We’re now reading "Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Speare and have finished biographies of John Smith and Pocahontas and a book called "The Courage of Sarah Noble." I have a Colonial Kids activity book, so we’ll make some crafts and food, too. We have a stack of books from the library, some of which are more for my preschool crowd.

For math, my boys have finished Alpha in Math-U-See, so I’ve ordered Beta. We’re still working on getting their addition facts down pat. We have a "Math Shark" electronic toy which makes it more fun for them to practice than using flash cards.

In science, we just finished studying the earth and are now learning about the moon. We started listening to Jules Verne’s "Journey to the Center of the Earth." We have a couple of fun projects to do, including making cookies and decorating them like the phases of the moon! We’ll be reading two biographies of men who went to the moon: Destination Moon about Jim Irwin and another about Neil Armstrong. We also need to listen the moon episode on Jonathan Park.

As a family we’re working on memorizing Matthew chapter 5. The boys are also using that passage for copywork. The girls are working in their Handwriting Without Tears books.

For music, the 3 older kids are still taking violin lessons, and my oldest is learning to play the guitar as well. We’re singing as a family and trying to learn some part-singing. I still haven’t started teaching piano and hope to do that soon. We’re learning about Haydn right now and listening to a different one of his works daily for a week at a time, this week is the Surprise Symphony and next week we’ll listen to the Farewell Symphony.

In Spanish, the kids are listening to lessons by The Easy Spanish. We’re just listening to them on the iPod, not doing any written work on it. Two more subjects–for art the boys are drawing from one of several nice drawing instruction books we have. And for PE, they are doing TappCore exercises daily.

In the afternoon during their one-hour rest time, they are to read silently for 30 minutes and play and educational game together. It’s a full and fun schedule! Since I instituted the independent work notebook (see a couple of posts back), things have gone so much smoother!