Fall Term 2015

This term, the focus was on a very exciting part of history: the time period from just before the American Revolution to just after the War of 1812. We covered both world history and American history.  For American history, we started with what led up to the Revolutionary War; things like the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax. Once the War began, we read several books about the War and the people who fought both on the battlefield and in the government. We read George vs George, Toliver's Secret, A Young Patriot, and Benjamin Franklin. They gave a great deal of insight into all facets of how the War was fought and won. Olivia has also been reading George Washington's World and Amos Fortune. For World history, we covered events like the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon along with the view of the American Revolution and it's aftermath from the European point-of-view. We read The Story of Napoleon, which was a very interesting account of his entire life, from childhood to exile.

For Science, Olivia has been doing A Nature Walk with Aunt Bessie from Queen's Homeschool. It's been a really interesting adventure with a varied array of topics from:

 spiders (ew!)

 to moles (this is a clay model of a mole's tunnel)

to earthworms

 snails,

 and sparrows. (a nest we found at Grandma and Grandpa's)

For Math, Olivia finished Book 4 of Math Lessons for a Living Education and changed over to Life of Fred to do Kidney, Liver, and Mineshaft. This time, she is handling the transition pretty well and learning some pretty interesting concepts like dealing with super-large numbers (turning billions and trillions into factors of 10). She doesn't seem to be having difficulty retaining the basics like she did on other occasions when we've switched. 

Gabe finished Book 2 of Math Lessons for a Living Education and so we decided to jump over and have him start Life of Fred - Apples. Both he and Ezra have been doing it together and are really enjoying the story. We have Ezra answer the questions orally while Gabe writes them out for practice. 

In Language Arts, Olivia has continued doing Intermediate Language Lessons. Gabe finished Language Lessons for Little Ones. Both Olivia and Gabe are doing daily copywork to practice their handwriting, Gabe focusing solely on printing while Olivia does both print and cursive. I personally struggle a little bit with being a perfectionist and expecting too much from them, but I am trying to impress upon them just how important good handwriting is, even in a world growing more and more reliant upon electronic communication. On that front, we've also started both of them on typing lessons through Typing.com. Olivia has progressed pretty fast and far in it, though once she hit a major milestone test and it took her 31 tries to finish it within the 50 seconds she was given. The point is that she did eventually get fast enough to pass it. Gabe is moving a little slower, but he still really likes it and I'm sure he will benefit from starting early.

Ezra has been working hard on his Rod and Staff preschool books, having finished Finding the Answers and moving on to Going on Eagerly. The exercises are challenging enough to keep him interested and feel excited about completing them without being so hard that he gives up in frustration. If I had any doubts about him being in the right book, they were dispelled when I accidentally started him on the Hearing and Helping Book, which is more advanced and clearly was too much for him right now. For Ezra's reading, we have been doing some sight word memorization, some word families and reading Bob books. After a frustrating start for him, he seems to be finally getting the hang of it and enjoying it.

Olivia is still voraciously reading books often taking a day or less to read a 100+ page book. Gabe has finally grown comfortable with his reading and does very well reading his Nature Reader every day. We've even found him reading for fun in his room, which is so encouraging after his early struggles with it.

Geography was a continuation and the completion of Joshua Slocum's solo journey around the world. He managed to complete his journey in 3 years, 2 months and 2 days after sailing alone for more than 46,000 miles!

As a family, we've been reading the Ralph Moody series of books together at the table. We've now finished the first two, Little Britches and Man of the Family. We will take a break from the series to read the second All of a Kind Family book, which is about a Jewish family living in New York City in the early 20th century. We loved the first book and the second is just as great!

For our Bible study, Olivia is doing Apologia's Who Am I and really enjoying it. It covers a lot of the "why are we here" questions that she's been having over the past year and does some very interesting compare-and-contrast work with other religions/belief systems. At the table, we're reading chapters  from our weekly Torah portion and doing FFOZ's Children's Torah Club workbooks. They really reinforce what they've heard in each portion and help them, in a fun way, to connect with the lessons God is teaching us through His word.

Outside the regular schoolwork, we'd been doing some nature study things on our own. We looked at mushrooms one day when we had a bunch growing in the yard.

Sadly, we missed a chance to see the spores on the ground because of rain, but they still got to examine a big one up close.

When we went for a walk a few days later, we found a whole line of mushrooms growing over a root.
We also looked at deciduous and evergreen trees. Since it's fall, it's easy to identify the two, so I gave them an assignment: find 3 different kinds of deciduous trees.

They spotted an oak.

and a pine (no, not deciduous, but big and obvious nonetheless)

 

And then we found maples.  unfortunately, we were too late for the beeches. The leaves were already gone from them.

There are lots of maples in our neighborhood.

 We found Silver Maples, Sugar Maples, and Hard Maples

We brought home leaves to do rubbings.

Fall Term 2014

Well, we finished up the third term of Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, and Epistles right at the end of 2014 and did our exams in the first week on 2015. It's impressive just how much our kids are able to retain after weeks of information are crammed into their little heads.

We spent the majority of the term on Martin Luther and William Tyndale and their struggles to get the Bible printed in the common languages of their respective homelands. It's staggering the persecution that these men, along with many others like Zwingli, Calvin and Knox, faced just for wanting the common folk to be able to read God's Word. It's because they chose to stand firm and face death that we are a able to hold our own Bible in our hands every day without fear. For resources, we read Thunderstorm in the Church, which was about Luther's trials and tribulations from the point of view of his son. Then we read The Bible Smuggler, which was about William Tyndale and told from the perspective of his young assistant. Both books were written by Louise Vernon and really brought the work of these two great men to life for the kids. We also added a third Louise Vernon book, The Night Preacher, which was about Menno Simons and the start of the Anabaptist  movement.

For math, Olivia switched back to Life of Fred and did Honey, Ice Cream and Jelly Beans before continuing with Book 4 of  Queen Homeschooling's Math Lessons for a Living Education. Personally, while she liked the LoF books, I felt like she lost a little ground with her basic math facts that she had been doing with the Kumon books, particularly when it came to long division. As a result of this, we decided to have her do some math drill sheets to improve her retention of math facts. It has been helping quite a bit. I think she needs that kind of repetition to help her retain the information.

For Science, Olivia started on the Human Body. We did it just over a year ago, but she enjoyed it so much and wanted to do a more in-depth study. We are doing this with two curricula, Queen Homeschooling's Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and Apologia's Exploring Creation. What we did was let Olivia do a lesson in the Queen's book, which lays a strong foundation in a CM/storybook format and gets her interested and excited about the subject. Queen's has her doing research to find things like the names of bones, muscles and organs or figure out how a muscle contracts and write a small paragraph on it. She usually has to draw whichever body system she's focusing on. Then she moves to the corresponding chapters in Apologia for a more textbook-ish, fact-filled lesson. Apologia's book has "Try This!" sections throughout the lessons that often have different quick experiments that she can try on her own and the end of each lesson has one or two larger experiments that we will help her with, if she needs it. Occasionally some of the smaller experiments are duplicated, but there is always enough variety that we will just skip the duplicated ones in the Apologia book. This is a subject that Olivia has successfully become largely self-directed in. We will help her access the internet to research topics and check her work, but for the most part, she will read, research and complete assignments independently.

A brain with the different regions in different colors.

 A nerve cell

 Olivia made a clay figure, but it was too soft to stand.

 She then put toothpicks in its body like a skeleton and it could stand fine. :)

For the Bible, we read through 2 Corinthians. It was a difficult book to read with the kids because Paul uses a surprising amount of sarcasm and hyperbole when telling the believers in Corinth that they're foolish for believing false teachings when they've already heard the Truth from him. Apparently the people listened and believed Paul, who asked and took nothing from them while he was there, but then they inexplicably paid other men who claimed to have the real gospel when it was really false. While most of the content was went over the boys' heads, Olivia did grasp that Paul was telling them "that they shouldn't be so easily fooled by people who look smart."

In Geography, Olivia has mastered the map of Europe and is nearly perfect in remembering the countries of Asia. It's been pretty cool seeing her work to memorize the names and locations of all the tiny middle-European nations.  Olivia's main focus in exploration was Balboa, who discovered the Pacific, and Magellan, whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the Earth.

Gabe is moving up in his schoolwork, finishing Book 1 of Queen's Math Lessons for a Living Education. He's picked up pretty quickly on telling time and skip counting, though he did have a little trouble grasping place values. Queen's uses a "Place Value Village" (which we talked about here) and it seemed like his head and mouth were getting ahead of his hands and so he would get confused.We had to go over it with him and get him to slow down and think about what he was doing before he finally grasped the concept.  In his reading, he's really come a long way. He's not the fastest reader, but he's much more confident and has taken to actually reading for fun and not just flipping through looking at pictures. I've found that if we give him a break from the proscribed reader and let him choose a suitably difficult book on his own, he attacks it with gusto and does very well. now that he's putting sentences together consistently, he's starting to have much better comprehension and enjoying the books more. There have been a few times that he's asked to continue so he can find out what's going to happen next! :)

Ezra has started his own reading curriculum, Simple Charlotte Mason's Delightful Reading. We have started out doing letter families. He knows the sounds each letter makes so we take a simple word ending like -et and have him place each letter of the alphabet in front of it and determine what are real words like bet, get, jet, let, pet, and set. We've been doing it 5 days a week and changing the vowel associated with the last letter (-at, -et, -it, -ot, -ut). Some days he's gung-ho about it and others you would think we'd asked him to cut off a toe. He can be rather dramatic at times, like someone we know...

We have continued in our breakfast routine of reading part of the Torah portion, some poetry, a chapter from a read-aloud book and our memory verses. Recently, Irene "helped" me reshuffle our verses in the box and as I picked them all up off the floor, I counted 125 verses/portions that the kids have memorized, including the whole of Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 1 Corinthians 13! Even Emma chimes in most days and is able to recite along with the older kids. For a read-aloud, we have been going through the Thornton Burgess books, this time doing The Adventures of Happy Jack and The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel. The kids have absolutely loved these books, but sadly these are the last ones in our box set. However, we're going to be starting The Trumpet of the Swan next, which is one none of us has read, so we're very excited.

Gabe's Math and Other Schoolwork

Gabriel has been doing Queen Homeschool's Math Lesson for a Living Education this term and has been doing very, very well with it. Like everything by Queen's, it' CM-ish in approach, so there's a story at the beginning of the week followed by 5 lessons related to math topic discussed in the story.  

He works with a "Place Value Village" to help him understand place values like ones, tens and hundreds.

At the end of the week, there's usually a recap page that's in the form of a letter from the children in the story to their parents.

The story weaves in a bot of nature study with the math and talks about things like weather, various animals and life cycles.  One topic was about how plants grow, so he actually had to grow a bean plant. He then had to draw it every day for a week to document its growth. It got quite tall and started flowering in the jar before a mishap caused its demise. 

 For practice, he uses a dry-erase sheet to figure out math problems that we give him. He's gotten to where he's pretty quick with the answers.

However, if he gets stuck, he can use a counting chart to help him.

He's been enjoying the lessons every day. Once we finish this, I think we might try Life of Fred with him to see how he does with that.

Recent School Adventures with Gabe and Ezra

For our Literature based Unit Study (FIAR) this month, we have turned to a couple of Virginia Lee Burton books--Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and Maybelle the Cable Car. The boys of course think these are super fun books. Anything with machinery and vehicles hit the spot with them. We cheered on Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann as they beat the odds to complete the task of digging the cellar. We talked about the character qualities of working hard, faithfulness, good stewardship, and encouraging one another. We talked about the progression of technology from steam shovels to electric and diesel powered machinery. We did a science experiment on the states of matter. We then learned about San Francisco, its geography, and the famous cable cars. This story is based on the attempt to preserve their place in the life of San Francisco. Again, we talked about the progression of technology and times. We also discussed some of the topics of city politics that were brought up in the book. (Interestingly election day fell this week--pretty cool timing that I didn't plan). We showed the kids how the cable cars functioned and did a demonstration about friction. We discussed cheerfulness which is something that Maybelle demonstrates well. She also is gracious to forgive Bill the bus who was jealous of her and a bit mean until the end of the story. Gabe wrote a selection from each of the stories. We did story problems based off of Mike Mulligan and we learned about tally marks with Maybelle.

Gabe started a new math curriculum that he loves. It is like Olivia's (just an earlier volume). It is called Math Lessons for a Living Education. Each week there is a story to read and then there are short exercises for each day that week. He is mostly writing numbers and associating objects with numbers. He continues to work through Rod and Staff preschool books. He is trying much harder and making gains with his reading skills.

Ezra asked for his own workbooks so we got some of the early Kumon books for him to work on. He is doing coloring and tracing right now. He gets up early and does them first thing in the morning. Well, after he sneaks outside bare foot to do who knows what... Every morning we hear him go outside and when asked, he says he was just going outside for a bit. :)

A Visit to the Vet

Olivia has spent the 6 months doing a science curriculum through Queen Homeschool called Our Animal Friends. It is part of their Discovering Nature and Science series. Each week there was a continuing story to read. This book is about a girl who lives next door to her uncle who is a veterinarian. She learns through talking to him about many different kinds of animals. After each story portion there are four lessons that require her to do further research and learn herself about the type of animal discussed. We allowed her to use an internet based encyclopedia as well as some other internet sites to do her research. This was a bit of a hard decision for us as we were not sure about setting her free around the internet. But she had pretty strict guidelines about what she could do and we were close by. We actually invested in a subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica online so as to avoid the popup ads which are really the main problem and distraction that we ran into. Olivia really enjoyed all the animals she learned about. The last chapters talked about animal careers. We have friends that have a veterinarian practice in downtown Greensboro and they graciously allowed Olivia to spend the morning there. John is a talented vet and he was just wonderful teaching Olivia about the work he did.

John showed us around and let Olivia meet the various pets who were "vacationing" with him.

She got to meet Turtle, the practice's resident cat, and hear about how he had lost more than 15 pounds since coming to live with them!

Olivia got to see them remove the sutures from this poor dog who had suffered a mysterious burn, but was recovering well after surgery.

Then came the main event: A feline dental. 

She got to see them put the cat under and do the cleaning part of the dental work.

Sadly, the poor boy had to have a couple of teeth removed, but it was really neat to watch.

In the end, everything turned out well and the cat was recovering nicely.

Thanks again to John and his staff for such a great time!