Weekly update for the week of 10/4/2010

It was a good week this week. We had a fun time with school and I noticed some improvements in some areas. In History N. continued to study Egypt and biblical history that ties in with Egypt. Noah amazed me with some of his insight. Usually he reads and doesn't say much after he reads, but this week he was really starting to makes some connections which is huge for him. He read about Moses and the golden calf and he says "Mom don't you find it kind of amazing that while Moses was up receiving the 10 commandments, the people were down already breaking the first 2 of them." I also have seen growth in this area when we do the Friday activity during storytime where we both find verses from Proverbs that connects to the story we are reading. At first this was hard for him, but now he is really doing a great job with it. He also showed increased independance with his written narration this week. He did it 95 % on his own and I saw him taking things he is using in his writing curriculum and carrying these over. He was careful about his wording and he made sure that everything flowed and stuck to the topic.

His history project this week was Aaron's Breastplate and the 12 stones that symbolized the 12 tribes of Israel. It was pretty cool because S. helped him figure out how to mix the colors of paint to most accurately resemble the stones in his notebook. He worked very hard on his Hebrew writing.


For Science he was learning about various animals in the Rodentia family. His Science experiment was about Anteaters. He and his sister tried to pick up Chocolate Chips with their tongues. S. was actually very good at it and N. and I decided she would make a good Anteater.


He started a new book for DITHOR reading this week. It is for the non-fiction genre and it is called Dragons from the Deep. He is enjoying, but needs to work a little bit on remembering what he read.

Both kids once again really enjoyed doing the watercolor paintings. In fact S. is very upset that for the next 2 weeks there isn't a painting since N. will be memorizing a Robert Frost poem.



We finished reading "The Boy of the Pyramids" for storytime. Noah really enjoyed that book and again I saw him making predictions and connections that he doesn't usually make.
He continues to enjoy his Bible Quiet time and is working on memorizing Philippians 2.

In Grammar we continued our trial of Rod and Staff 5 and it is going very well. I want to see how he handles a writing lesson in there before I decide to completely switch over, but so far I am impressed with his retention and how much he seems to enjoy it.

Weekly update for weeks of 9/20 and 9/27

I didn't have my act together to post last week so I am posting a review of 2 weeks. It has been a good 2 weeks. Things are flowing smoothly now and I am starting to see some growth in some areas. In Science N. continues to read from the Exploring Creation with Land Animals of the 6th day. He loves this book. Last week he made air dry clay and put our 2 cats foot prints in it and then also one of the dogs. They weren't sure what they thought of it, but N. liked to see the difference in the 2 cats footprints since one is a big boy and one a dainty girl.


He continues to do well with CLE math, but I haven't been completely sold on CLE Language Arts. The looks of Rod and Staff had always intimidated him, but I asked him to give it a trial and see what he thought of it. We have done 2 lessons so far and he says he really likes it. We do most of it orally and I like that since I can make sure he is getting the concepts. I keep the writing down so his hands don't fatigue and I let him do things like write on the white board which seems easier for him. We are going to continue another week and see what we think. I have a feeling we will stick with it.

Last week he finished his first paragraph for Write with the Best. It was supposed to be a descriptive paragraph about an object and he chose our big cat Rudi. He still gets a lot of mental blocks when it comes to writing, but I thought he did a pretty good job with this one.
"My cat Rudi thinks he is king of the world. He sits on the cat post like a panther looking over his kingdom. He gets mad when everyone ignores him. He then randomly chomps the first person he sees. However, if you pet the furry beast he will purr loudly. My large tuxedo king can make you do almost anything."

Both kids continue to enjoy the painting. In fact I know it is S's favorite part of the week. Here is N's paintings from last week and this week.


Here is S's painting from this week.


In History we continue to learn about Egypt along with stories about Moses. For storytime we are reading "Boy of the Pyramids". Noah loves this book and is probably giving his best narrations ever. His narrations about his readings in History of the Ancient World are improving. I have taken Carrie, the curriculum authors suggestions and before he starts to read I write just the main people and places and tell him which is a person and which is a place and that seems to help him not get bogged down when he reads. He also is highlighting and that seems to help him.
He enjoyed working on his history project this week.



He continues to work hard on his notebooking pages. He likes to write in pen because it is darker and his hands don't get as tired, the down side is that his tremor shows up more in his writing. I continue to let him dictate some, type some and write some depending on how much space is available for him to write.


The highlight of this week was working on his Drawn Into the Heart of Reading Project for his book "Buffalo Bill". He dressed up and answered questions his dad would ask him about Buffalo Bill. We don't exactly have cowboy outfits around here so he had to improvise with an Indiana Jones hat and a marshmallow gun. It was pretty funny.



The other big news of the week is he started trombone lessons. He wanted to practice at 6am, thankfully his daddy stopped him.

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.

First Week

We have officially completed our first week of school and it went very well. We started off the week by going to the Creation Museum. N. is studying Ancient History this year so I figured it would give my visual learner another peg to hang his knowledge on as we go through the year. He enjoyed all the exhibits, but the Noah's ark exhibit was his favorite.


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.

Summers almost over

Summer is almost over. Hard to believe how fast it has gone. We will officially start school on August 24th. We will have a "new student" in our school this year. S who is in 10th grade will be joining us. She felt that leaving ps to come home was exactly what God wanted her to do. It has been a challenge picking curriculum and doing lesson plans for her, but I think we are ready to go. You can see the curriculum we have chosen in the sidebar.

I never thought I would homeschool even one, much less 2, but I know it is what God has called us to do so I am excited to see what he does with it all.

Weekly update for the week of 4/26/10

We had another good week of school. Hard to believe the year is almost over. N continues to enjoy our days.

In history this week he learned about Napoleon and Simon Bolivar. He knew of Napoleon because one of his favorite movies is "Night of the Museum 2". His written narration this week was on Handel. We had studied him in our composer study so this was a pretty easy narration for him. In his independent history reading he is reading "Mozart the Wonder Boy" and is listening to a CD that goes along with this book. He touched his Momma's heart when we were listening to this and he asked me to dance with him. We danced a very clumsy waltz around the room.

His history project was making the French Revolution flag. He was proud of his work when he was done.


He continues to improve on his ability to research topics and needs less help with this now than he did before. He makes vocabulary cards each week and usually does very well with this. This week however he got a little lazy with his definitions and so all his sentences started with "Look there is a ...". We talked about putting forth his best effort and comparing those sentences to ones he had done earlier in the year and he agreed he could do better, so he redid them.


In science he finished up his book on Pasteur and microbes and is now reading "Albert Einstein". He did an experiment last week of putting plain bread, a piece of bread with plain water on it and a piece of bread with sugar water on it all in seperate bags and put them in a dark, warm place. We were supposed to then check them in a week. We pulled the bags out expecting to see mold and we saw nothing. Our best guess is the preservatives in the bread kept it from molding.

His poem this week was called "Historical Associations" and he was sad since it is the last new poem of the year. He wrote his own poem based on this poem and did a nice job with it.

In Math he was very excited to finish up the 400 level of CLE math and started the 500 level. We had done the 400 level this year since CLE was advanced compared to what he did in ps.
Math is definitely one of his strengths.

Co-op ended this week and then they had a homeschool expo. N was in a drama class so they performed some plays for the expo. He was Prince Charming in a short version of "Sleeping Beauty". I think he made a very handsome prince.