Spring Term 2016

We continued on with our trek through Modern History, picking up with the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford. Now we're getting to something the kids are really interested in! We read through "The Wright Brothers: Pioneers of American Aviation", which was a great book because it covered a lot of their younger years and showed how their parents influenced their drive to take something that was already invented and make it better than before. This is what inspired our trip to the beach last month.

Also during this time, the kids read about George Washington Carver, who is best known for his research into peanuts, but we found out that there was so much more to the man's work and life!

He was born into slavery in the 1860s, but was freed and then cared for and educated by his former master. George worked his way through school to eventually teach Botany at the Tuskegee Institute and become one of the pioneers of crop research. 

At the same time, we were reading a fascinating book called "Across America on an Emigrant Train" by  Jim Murphy, who, by using Robert Louis Stevenson's journal of the trip, tells the story of how Stevenson traveled across America on a train filled with immigrants from Europe who were settling the West. They had to endure cramped conditions, poor food, and all sorts of hardships on their way and we got a glimpse of the events of the times like the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.

On our journey through history, we studied events like the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, the sinking of the Titanic,  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (look it up. it's why we have OSHA today), and World War I and World War II.

Not surprisingly, the World Wars took up a good deal of our World History Studies as well. We read some books like Where Poppies Grow and Only a Dog, both about WWI.

We also read Endless Steppe, which gives a glimpse of what life in Russia was like for those who weren't part of the Revolution. It follows a teenage girl and her family as they are arrested and shipped of to Siberia after being accusing of being Capitalists.

Geography

This term, we read through Minn of the Mississippi, which follows the life and travels of a snapping turtle from its hatching point in northern Minnesota all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans. The book covers a span of about 3 years and discusses the history of the river, the various types of terrain it pass through and the various cities that lie along it's path, which has changed over time, leaving some former river-towns high and dry away from its current route. All-in-all, it's a really interesting book, just like all the others in the series.

Read-Alouds

We went through a few read-alouds this term that the kids really enjoyed. The first was A Cricket in Times Square, which tells the story of a cricket that gets accidentally carried from the country to a subway station in New York City and the various people and animals he meets while there.

Then we read Eyes for Benny, which is about a boy who contracts scarlet fever and is bed-ridden for several months. During his convalescence, his friends come together to collect all kinds of caterpillars, cocoons, butterflies and moths for his collection, making his time stuck inside much more enjoyable.

We also read the follow up, Birds at My Window, which tells about Benny having a relapse during the winter and how his dad builds him a bird feeder outside his window. The story is a lot of fun and has a really cool second half when Benny begins to recover.

Science

Olivia is continuing on with A Nature Walk with Aunt Bessie on her own, but together, the kids are doing Outdoor Secrets, which they do 3 times a week. It just involves listening to a story being read and then narrating it back. The stories don't necessarily follow a set pattern, but rather jump from topic to topic; one day talking about bees, the next about trees, then about squirrels. It keeps the stories fresh and interesting and even Ezra is able to give me a basic, but good narration of the stories.

Ezra and Emma

Ezra continues to work at Delightful Reading and is really getting the hang of it, even though he won't admit it. Hes working through his sight words and phonograms almost every day and is starting to recognize them when we read together. That's probably been the hardest part: making the connection between the sight words on the cards and the words in his readers. He's been reading though a Little Bear book and (when he's not flipping out over a word) is really liking it.

Emma is such a little trooper. She loves doing her "schoolwork" which is still her ABC art book. She won't let me get away with skipping a day! 

The Reader's Nook - Olivia's Bookstore Math Project

We took a break from Math Lessons to do a 12-week project that involved Olivia creating a bookstore that she had to run. We got this from an e-book package we had purchased through Simply Charlotte Mason a while back. She was responsible for maintaining inventory, paying bills, taking orders, advertising and the bookkeeping that goes along with it. We did one "Month" per week.

 She wrote checks each month to pay her rent and utilities.

 She took orders from virtual customers.

 There were two random draws each month, one for In-Store Sales and one that had random bonuses/challenges that she would have to deal with.

At the end of each "month" she had to add up all her expenses and income and determine if she made a profit or a loss for that month as well as keep a running total for the year.

In the end, she did well. She started with $10,000 and finished with almost $16500, so a decent profit.

It Apple Picking Time! (Plus Nature Study)

We started a new Nature Study unit this month with the coming in of apple picking season. We are using Outdoor Secrets that we got from Simply Charlotte Mason as a curriculum for it. The booklays out simple lessons that only take a few minutes, but really engage the kids in listening to stories or making observations about a topic. The first topic in the book is... Apples! We looked at different varieties of apples, read a couple of books from the library (How Do Apples Grow and Johnny Appleseed), and cut an apple open to see the "blossom" left inside. 

A couple of years ago, we had Olivia study the cherry trees across the street from our house and draw them once per season. Another year, she did the big Dogwood in our back yard. This year, we're going to do an apple tree and the three older kiddos will all participate. We contacted Devil Dog Orchard, which is out on 150 in Rockingham County, and asked if we could come and sit in the orchard and draw the trees.

The kids observed the tree both from a distance and up close. Then they had to write or tell me what they saw.

 Olivia

 

 Gabe

 Ezra

 The folks at DDO went above and beyond, going so far as to pull out the hay wagon and take us on a ride around the property. The kids even got to feed the fish in their pond. :)

After the ride, we spent a little time picking a bucket-full of Gala apples that are just fantastic! 

Spring Term 2015

This Spring, we continued our study of SCM's Early Modern and Epistles, focusing now on the events between the Colonial Era and the American Revolution.

In America, we learned about the major colonies and colonists like Captain John Smith in Jamestown, William Penn in Pennsylvania, and the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (New York). We read about explorers like Henry Hudson and James Cook, who searched for the Northwest Passage through North America to get to China. James Cook, on one of his expeditions, inadvertently became the first European to find Australia! His crew also became the first to sail around the world 3 times. Captain Cook himself died in Hawaii on that third time around.

 Olivia had to make an oiled window for a project about the Colonial Era. Glass was very expensive, so people used animal skins or paper to cover their windows and keep the rain out while letting some light in. While not a good as glass, we could see that it really did work.

For Geography, we continued our journey with Joshua Slocum, Passing around Cape Horn and making it to Australia. Appropriately enough, Olivia's map drills were of Australia. Our map of the trip continues to grow.

For Science, we studied about Isaac Newton. We read all about his life and how he discovered so many things we take for granted like how rainbows are made, gravity, and why things move the way they do. We did experiments that demonstrated some of his Laws.

 Newton's first law

Newton's third law

In her math, Olivia and Gabe are both learning some new things. Olivia is learning about averages, which makes her use multiple functions to get the answer. She also learned about how to measure the area of a room and had to make a big poster of our house's floorplan. She measured each room and figured out the perimeter and area in square feet. 

Gabe has been learning a lot about measuring, not only in feet and inches, but in cups, pint, quarts and gallons. He even made a Measuring Man to help him learn the relationships. He's also getting into borrowing and carrying with 2- and 3-digit addition and subtraction.

Gabe has been doing more and more reading and is getting much better at it. The trick for him is to get him interested in reading something and to vary what he reads. He does have a reading book, but some days, especially if he has word problems or a story in his math book, I'll let him skip the regular book and choose something else.

For our bible study, Olivia did a study on the book of Hebrews. It's pretty impressive just how much a 10-year-old can pick up and retain from reading some pretty complicated stuff in the Bible. With the rest of the kids, we continue to build our retinue of memory verses and read the Torah Portion each week at the breakfast table.

Now you may be saying, "Where's Ezra? What's he doing?" Well, that kid is a champ. He's the first one up in the classroom each morning and goes right to work on his Do It Carefully book and his K4 worksheets. He's starting to learn some of the basics of reading, but he guesses a lot and gets easily frustrated when he's wrong. If I can get him to calm down and look closely at what's there, he can usually pick it up.

Lastly, we did two read-alouds this term. The first one was a book, that once I began to read it, I realized I had read it in school when I was a kid. It's called The Matchlock Gun. It's the story of a family of Dutch settlers in upstate New York that have to defend themselves from an Indian attack while the father is away. As I read it, I vividly remembered my own mental pictures of the story. It was really cool to share that with the kids. 

The second read-aloud book we did is the story of Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch woman that helped to protect and smuggle Dutch Jews during the Nazi occupation in WWII. Her story of perseverance and faith in the concentration camps in the face of horrible conditions and death is nothing short of amazing. We have her autobiography, The Hiding Place, and are planning on reading that as well. 

Olivia's Winter Term 2015

At the beginning of the year we started a new time period in the Simply Charlotte Mason Curriculum: Early Modern and Epistles. It started with the Pilgrims coming to America and covered the beginning of the Colonial Era in America. This year is different, however, because the timeline splits, with one branch covering America and the other covering the rest of the world. So at the same time we were reading about Pilgrims, Quakers, and Indians, we were hearing about Shakespeare and Galileo.

Olivia wrote a "diary entry" of a Pilgrim girl.

For the American side of the timeline, we primarily read The Landing of the Pilgrims for Olivia and then a series of books like Sarah Morton's Day, Samuel Eaton's Day, Tapenum's Day and The Courage of Sarah Noble for the boys. The Landing of the Pilgrims was a really detailed account of the Pilgrims' journey from England to Holland and then to Massachusetts, with excerpts taken directly from journals or diaries of actual Pilgrims. The books for the boys all had wonderful pictures of children in period dress acting out the typical day's work that they would have had to do. Needless to say, the kids were all very thankful that we don't live in those times, though it did give me some ideas...

So I put them to work weeding the garden. :)

On the "Rest of the World" side of the timeline, we mostly covered English history, specifically Shakespeare and the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. We spent a good bit of time specifically on Queen Elizabeth because she was such an important figure in English history. It was during her time that the arts and theater thrived, the Spanish Armada was defeated and the struggle between Catholics and Protestants was calmed, though not entirely resolved. For her portion, we read Good Queen Bess along with the materials included in the Stories of the Nations that comes with the curriculum.

For Shakespeare, we read The Bard of Avon, which told about his life before, during and after the theater. We also read a longer book called Master Skylark, which is about a boy who is somewhat unwillingly pressed into the service of an unscrupulous play director. The boy is from Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon and goes on quite and adventure that sees him eventually playing for the Queen herself! While the period language was a bit tough to muddle through at times, it was a very interesting story that the kids really enjoyed. Not too long after we finished the term, Greensboro put on Shakespeare in the Park with As You Like It for the play. It was performed by a group of middle-school-aged children who did a fantastic job. Sadly, I was under the weather that day and forgot to bring the camera along with me. :(

Aside from English history, we also studied about Galileo Galilei. We read the books Galileo's Leaning Tower Experiment, Starry Messenger, and Along Came Galileo. The kids really enjoyed hearing about his various experiments, especially dropping things from great heights. I'm quite surprised we didn't have any "incidents" considering one of our boys' penchant for causing destruction. :)

Rather fortuitously, it turned out that UNCG was putting on a performance of Philip Glass's Opera Galileo Galilei just as we were finishing up the term, so I got tickets for Olivia and I. Neither of us had ever been to an opera so it was a new experience for us both. Fortunately, it was in English and the put subtitles on a screen over the stage so it was easier to follow along. It was very cool. It moved backwards through his life by starting when he was an old man remembering earlier times and then it gradually moved back through time until he was a young boy, touching on not only his experiments, but also on his struggles with the Church and their reaction to his writings.

For Geography, we started a very interesting book: Sailing Alone Around the World. It's the log of Joshua Slocum, a sailor in the late 1890s that decided to undertake a solo journey around the world. He was no stranger to sailing, having been a sea captain on merchant vessels for decades before. The story is very detailed and tells a lot about not only the places he visited but also the people he encountered and the weather he had to endure. Since we'll be doing this book all year, we only covered his journey from Connecticut to Buenos Aires, Argentina by way of the Azores and Gibraltar. Now, you may be saying, "Gibraltar's not between Connecticut and Argentina...?" and you'd be right. Read the book. :) A fun part of this is that we're tracing the route on a map each week. We found a website called Scribblemaps that lets you draw on a map and save it so you an add to it later. Here's ours so far.

For Science, Olivia's continuing the tag-team of Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and Apologia's Exploring Creation. In particular, she's been learning about muscles and blood. She learned about long and short muscle fibers, voluntary and involuntary movements, and what makes up blood (red blood cells, white blood cells and plasma). She did an experiment that involved making "blood" from corn syrup (plasma), Red Hots (red cells) and jelly beans (white cells). She also made a stethoscope out of a funnel, some tubing and a balloon. It really works!

In addition to all that, she is doing some form Language Arts every day with Spelling Wisdom, Pictures in Cursive, Word of the Week and Intermediate Language Lessons. She's also keeping up with her piano practice, which is showing great returns as you've seen from her recital videos. :)

For one of her Language Lessons, she was tasked with writing a letter to a "friend" who was thinking about quitting school. We were surprised at just how caring and thoughtful her letter was. It's a great insight into her wonderful heart. :)

I'll have more on what the boys are doing on their own in the next post.