Our Homeschooling Week
Last week we started our unit study on American Indians. We’re reading a great book "Sign of the Beaver," as well as "Little House on the Prairie" and "Stories of the Pilgrims." All will help introduce the kids to some American Indian culture. One of my focuses on this study is to prepare my children to be effective witnesses to the Native American community. We have a number of library books to read and will make some crafts and do a lapbook, too.
In the evenings my husband is reading Exodus and "Ten P’s in a Pod" to the boys.
My 6yo finished his first grade Rod and Staff readers and started the second grade one today. My 7 yo is still reading aloud "The Wizard of Oz" and the 5 yo is working on the first 8 phonograms in TATRAS.
For math we started a money workbook last week, which the boys worked on while we were at gymnastics for the girls. Today they played a logic game from the Family Math book, as well as dominoes. And we read a living book about subtraction tonight. I got together with a lady last Friday who has 14 children, 10 still at home. She just started math with her 9th child who is about to turn 10 years old. She said she doesn’t do math with her kids until 5th grade. I have written before about my beliefs about math–only doing it informally before age 10, but I still have doubts about it occasionally. I was just about to purchase Math-U-See. However, after talking with her, I still think we’re on the right track and can wait on the formal curriculum purchase for a couple of years.
I’ve been doing better for the last week in remembering to have the kids narrate. Every day before I begin reading "Sign of the Beaver" I’ve been having the boys tell me what happened in our previous chapter. For Bible Time, we started a little study called "Thanks and Giving" that I got free from CurrClick last week. It has copywork, drawing, and explanation of Scripture and doctrine in it. We just studied the definitions of mercy and grace and the kids drew some wonderful pictures of meeting Jesus in Heaven! They’re also all working on memorizing a verse about being thankful to recite for their family at Thanksgiving. We’ll also learn the song "Come Ye Thankful People, Come."
Last Saturday the boys went with their dad to see the musical "Narnia." I’ve been hoping to get out to a forest preserve to collect some leaves, but now the weather has turned really cold. Early last week was beautiful, but we had so much other stuff going on. Our furnace got fixed (not replaced–the part was under warranty–yeah!), my 5yo and 2 yo had their annual check-ups, we had swim lessons and started gymnastics, and I took my newborn to have a MRI. She has a birthmark on her lower spine, so we needed to make sure there was no tethering to the spinal column. There isn’t–Praise God! And I was able to get her to sleep so she didn’t need to be sedated! So…we’ll see if the weather will cooperate to get out soon.
Sounds like a busy week!
It sounds like your kids are doing great! I posted a brief update on my page about what is going on with us.
~Jenny