N. was very excited to get back to a HOD program. He loves all the activities and books that are in the programs. I was concerned about the more advanced reading that would be required of him in CTC, but he seems to be doing ok with it at this point. I think it helps that the main spine "The History of the Ancient World" has a lot of biblical history in it at this point so it is stories he is familiar with. He loves listening to the Diana Waring "What in the World" CD. He thinks she is funny and that is always a good thing for him.
For Drawn into the Heart of Reading he started the book "Buffalo Bill". He likes adventure stories and decided he would like to spend a day with Bill hunting and canoeing. We picked up where we left off with our vocabulary and language arts books and he is doing well.
In Science he started reading the "Land Animals of the Sixth Day" book and of course my animal loving kid loves this. The experiment this week was on how camouflage helps the prey from being eaten by the predator. He filled up a laundry basket with crumpled sheets of paper the same colors as 3 of the colors in skittles. He then dumped the skittles in the basket and had 2 minutes to find them. They kept sinking to the bottom so his hypothesis wasn't quite correct, but he had so much fun doing it. His older sister S decided she couldn't miss out on the fun so she did her own version of searching. She decided to start throwing all the colored paper out of the basket. When I told her she couldn't do that she said "it's deforestation". That cracked me up. N. seems to really enjoy having her home with him this year even though they are often working in different rooms.
For Poetry this year he will be painting a different watercolor painting each week to go along with a Robert Frost Poem. This will be a challenge for him due to his hand coordination, but he loved doing it this week. He wanted to do the poem copywork in manuscript instead of typing it and found it was tougher than he thought to fit it all on the 3x5 card. Next week he may just type it. I found a really nice portfolio at Michaels that I plan to use to store all his paintings.
We started the book "Genesis Finding our Roots" that we do for Bible Study together. I think it will be a good book to give him a solid foundation for what he believes. We also started the book "A Child's Geography Vol II -The Holy Lands". We started learning about Turkey. He is having some trouble answering questions after we have read, but I think this will improve as he gets back in the habit of oral narration and listening for details.
For Storytime we are reading "The Dinosaurs of Eden" and he loves it. There are different types of oral narration exercises this year and he is still getting used to those, but again I know this is an area that we just need to keep working one.
This year his program, CTC, comes with beautiful notebooking pages. They have boxes he needs to write in and I was worried it would be too difficult for him, but he did great this week. We do a combination of him writing right in the box if what he is writing is short, dictation to me if the writing is really long, typing his written narration, and writing on a bigger piece of paper and folding it. He kept a good attitude through it all and can see that he will have a great notebook to look at it when the year is over.
All in all it was a great first week. It is a little tricky for me figuring out how to juggle time with N. and S. , but we are already starting to figure out a routine.
