Educational Report: Week of January 5, 2014

In addition to my photography goals (which I shared here), I'm hoping to focus more on our blog. One thing I'd like to do is review our educational pursuits- summaries of what we did each week, memory work, curriculum reviews & more pictures! My friend, Dawn, is AMAZING at keeping up with educational reports. Let's see if this is the year that I can keep up with it too. :)




Last week was rough. I mean really rough. I told Eric that if this had been my first week educating, I'd have packed up everything & enrolled everyone in school. For that matter, if it had been my first week parenting, I'd had packed everyone up and... Like I said, it was really tough. I knew it would be difficult getting back into a routine after a long break following Katherine's birth. Plus, several of us were still feeling sickish with lingering colds. I purposefully left out a lot of things so it wouldn't be too much but it still was. My older three completely forgot how to do independent work. At least, that's what the story they tried to sell me.




I'm glad the week is OVER and I'm hoping this week goes smoother but here's the thing: weeks like last week are one of the main reasons we educate at home! I don't want to just brush over attitudes and heart things. (Actually, sometimes I do. But I shouldn't.) We educate at home so that we can walk alongside our children & train them in the ways of the Lord (and in the process, Eric & I grow too!). Sometimes that means its real & not at all pretty. But the fruit is sweet.




Okay, that was a long intro! Let's dig into what we did get done this week!




I decided to only tackle our composer study for memory time this week. After reading through some of Ordo Amoris ideas here, I was encouraged to get back to composer & artist studies. (We've done this in the past but it's been awhile. A long while.) I've planned out composers & artists to tie into the children's history. Yeah for Evernote to help keep it organized & Ambleside Online for links. I'll talk more about how we're doing memory work this year in a separate post. For now, I'll just share we started studying Bach as our composer so we listened to Magnificant in D each morning at breakfast & started reading "Sebastian Bach: The Boy from Thuringia." Fun!




We completed two lessons in the younger one's history. They covered the French and Indian War and the life of George Washington and King George III. We added to our timelines, wrote one narration page, copied sentences from our Founding Fathers, & did a lapbook project comparing the two Georges. Elizabeth & Jonathan are thrilled to get to do the lapbook this year! Patricia did a lot of reading of Henry V & Beowulf, as well as journaling for her history this week. We need to finish up her two lectures before FaceTime! YIKES! We are meeting one night each week with the Arendse family via FaceTime to discuss history. Eric leads the discussion. It's great fun to have another family join us in what we're studying!




For science, the younger ones covered 2 lessons on how leaves change colors and how to identify various trees. Benjamin & Patricia started a new science course & this week's readings covered the history of science. Everyone wrote narrations based on science. We have experiments that we haven't done yet.




Everyone completed several lessons in spelling. Jonathan & Elizabeth did several reading & writing lessons from PAL. They especially enjoyed learning about "ly" adverbs & adding to their quality adjective lists. They also read to me everyday. Yeah! I met with Abigail daily- she's working on learning her letters & numbers. Math happened everyday for everyone- lessons, drill sheets & flashcards. YAHOO! The older three worked on reviewing Latin and finished one lesson of Fix-It, which works on teaching grammar through editing skills. Benjamin did 1 chapter of his vocabulary book. Writing came via narrations this week, as well as copywork of the Bible. Patricia did typing once. Logic for the older three were various Critical Thinking & Mindbender pages. Younger ones did several pages of Explode the Code. Everyone was consistent with their personal Bible reading.




It helps to write this all out. We did more than I remember. But I do remember the process wasn't pretty. Did I already say it was a rough week? ;) Of course, this post would make more sense if I had listed what we were using this year. I'm still working on that- hopefully it will be done soon & I can list that in the header at the top.