Our Weekly Amble for February 2-6, 2015

Our week started out somewhat shaky.  Monday morning, R-girl felt sick first thing.  Oh, no.  But she got it out of her system (literally) and was feeling her normal perky self by the afternoon.  She was mad at me because I made her stay quiet in the afternoon, but I really didn’t want her to relapse, and she didn’t.

This was a four day, Week B, for us.

We did our pilates on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  It kinda fell apart at the end of the week after some later nights and busy mornings.

You don’t sing hymns with your stuffed Snoopy?

We had pretty good Circle Times all week.  I love that R-girl could sit in on Circle Time and hear almost everything even without participating.  With AO, a day lost to sickness doesn’t have to be a lost day. Nice. We read about the fall of Jericho from Joshua 5.  We did our last full week of singing “Lift High the Cross.” We reviewed Catechism through the first two commandments.  We sang hymns 12-16 on our review list.  We started to study the idea of “I am a child of God” from the CM Motto.

A surprise to me in Circle Time is how interested the children are in charting weather and reading about it from the Handbook of Nature Study.  N-boy tried drawing pictures to remind him of the characters on the Tower of the Winds in Athens that we read about.

Tennyson’s poetry has continued to be enjoyed, this week we read “Break, Break, Break” each morning and M-girl chose to write the last two lines into her Commonplace Book. We also continued with memorizing “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” They tell me they want to recite it together at the Homeschool Showcase at the end of May, we’ll see.

During Circle Time, we’ve been going through Memoria Press’ Grammar, one Lesson per week and that has been straightforward and easy. We also had studied dictations this week from Poor Richard. I need to learn more about how to do this right.  R-girl took to the floor for her writing. 

We finished Chapter 2 in Robinson Crusoe and started into Chapter 3.

Everyone but R-girl did math 4 days this week.  R-girl did 3 days.  M-girl is working on multiplication of multi-digit numbers. N-boy is working on three digit place values.  R-girl is working on adding and subtracting two, two digit numbers.

They were interested by King Philips’ War in their history reading. The children were so excited to finally put something on their maps from Minn of the Mississippi! We looked up the Itasca State Park where the snapping turtle lives and the Mississippi River begins.  They did some geography blobbing all week, I need to think about how to direct this better so we progress.  We’ve taken to reading Poor Richard with Daddy after dinner and are enjoying fruitful discussions out of that with him. Sometimes I think he misses out on what we’re learning and I love having him involved in this way!

The girls read Chapter 8 of Story Book of Science paragraph by paragraph together and then narrated it almost like a play to me, that was awesome. It was about how Uncle was counting the rings on a felled tree to determine its age. They are not enamored by Madam How and Lady Why, although M-girl sprang forth to get her Commonplace book to enter two quotes from our reading this week. She was intrigued by the idea of looking for something that can’t be found and making hypothesis from a point of knowledge. N-boy, in particular, has taken it into his head that he disagrees with the book’s premise and is grumpy about it.  He’ll come around, he always does.

Age of Fable continues to be a bit of a struggle.  I’m hoping that after this introductory material in Chapter 1, it will turn more to the stories and be more engaging than a list of gods and goddesses from Greek and Roman mythology.  On the other hand, Stories from the History of Rome has been a delight to all of us.  I am so glad that we decided to read that rather than delving directly into Plutarch this year.  I would not have wanted to miss this, and neither would the children.  We read about ‘The Horatii and the Curiatii.’ While the story is not a happy one, they hung on every word as I read and discussed it afterwards whether the brother or father or judges did the right thing.  Have I mentioned how grateful I am for AmblesideOnline in this post?  There’s more!

On Thursday, our “off” day, we did Circle Time at home and finished with picture study (we looked at The Last Judgement), composer study (the girls seem to like her pretty well, N-boy not so much, everyone likes the book), our folksong (not fans of Barbara Allen, they only don’t dislike the Pete Seeger version from the Ambleside Online playlist), and some of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the car on our travels.  The Fra Angelico painting ‘The Last Judgement’ brought quite a discussion as to what each part of the painting was and represented; who various people were; and then a discussion of trusting Christ, Christian humility, and thankfulness to God. Again, I can’t say enough about AO!

The girls worked on their Nature Study bags. Next week, we should work on adding buttons so they can be closed. 

The children have been reading from the free read list.  N-boy read Twenty and Ten and fell in love.  M-girl finished Return to Gone-Away this morning (since our library visit yesterday at 4:30). They both chose to do their written narrations this week on these free reads.  While they weren’t the best quality narrations, they were a good first step in this new system, and we got it done.  I’m pleased by that.

So, the week started in a way that I felt sure I was going to be frustrated in having a complete week.  We had our struggles finishing the work today and had to call Daddy at work (the worst threat ever).  But, overall, the work, the learning of the week, was phenomenal.