Weekly update for the week of 9/13/2010 for N.

This was our 4th week of CTC and things really started to come together. N. became much more comfortable with the routine of CTC and started doing most of the independent boxes on his own. He still needs some help with the Science experiment. This week's science experiment was the one minor glitch in our week. He has been learning about the relationship between prey and predator. The experiment was a simple one, but for some reason it took much longer to do than usual. Our deer kept multiplying and I kept having to cut out more until we had over 60 deer. Not sure if we did something wrong or not, but eventually he was able to see that as the deer increased the cougars increased and then as the cougars increased the deer decreased.

The rest of the week was wonderful. Both kids enjoyed doing the watercolor painting this week and I think they turned out great.


The big highlight was the History Project. First Noah made a headband for his shepherd head covering and then we had our Hebrew meal for lunch. It was so much fun.





Noah is doing a good job in his history notebook. Sometimes his writing is neater than others, depending on how tired he is, but I feel like he is putting forth his best effort.
He loves the Bible Quiet time. He likes to do it last thing to close out his day on a good note. He is having a good time with the CD that has Philippians 2 set to music.

I was worried about Write with the Best and that it might overwhelm him, but I really like the way it breaks things into small chunks. He wrote his first paragraph this week describing an object. He chose to describe Rudi our cat. He needed some encouragement and some guidance to fit all his descriptive adjectives and adverbs into good sentences, but I can tell this will be something he will grow in this year.

We have been using CLE language arts and he likes it, but I am still not sure he is retaining. We are going to try a week trial of Rod and Staff 5 once it gets here and see how it goes. We will do most of it orally and I am not sure how his retention will be that way, but I want to try it.

We continue reading The Golden Bull and this has been an enjoyable book for both of us. I think it gives a very good view of the Pagan religion in Ur in the time of Abraham.

Weekly update for the week of 8/30/2010

Our second week was a week of continuing to try and find our groove. Schooling 2 can get a little hectic at times, but both kids have been very patient if they need to wait for me to finish up with one. S is fairly independent with her work so that helps.

N. did Week 2 of Creation to Christ. We finished up our storytime book of "Dinosaurs in Eden" and we are now reading "The Golden Bull". N. is enjoying this book so far. He still likes listening to the Diana Waring audio CD's. He did a pretty good job this week with filling in his prophesies about Jesus chart. I love this part of the curriculum. I think it is so good for him to see how the prophecies were fulfilled.

His written narration this week was on a chapter from "The History of the Ancient World" called "the first war". Daddy was schooling him on this day and I guess N. had a tough time answering the questions before he started his narration. My dh wasn't sure what to do so he reread it to N. outloud and then had him do the narration. N. did better then, but still struggled some. I do worry that his comprehension with this book isn't what it should be. I think I am going to have him do some mini-narrations each day as he reads this book just so I know if he is getting it or not.

He started an Animal Track book in Science and of course loved that he read about dogs. With 3 of them here he had plenty of examples to study. His science experiment he also did with Daddy and with S and he thought it was funny that even though they knew he used lemon jello they still guessed it was strawberry when it had red food coloring in it.

He made a cylindrical seal and tablet with cuneiform writing on it for his history project. He and S. made up the dough for it.


He and S also both did watercolor painting this week for the poetry box. I can tell that S. likes some of the hands on things and since she has mostly textbooks I go ahead and let her do some of the things with N.

Overall it was a pretty good week. I am still trying to figure out how much to push N. It is so hard to find that balance between pushing him and asking him to do things he just can't physically do.