Our Weekly Amble for August 24-29, 2015

We had a week that improved as it went on.  It started out rough, as it often does, and improved to Friday’s excellent day.

Sometimes in homeschooling that groove is important.

I was so thankful that I had done planned out the week for both Circle Time and the rest of our lessons.  I want the children to get into the habit of checking assignments off their list so they aren’t always asking “what’s next?” or “how much do I have left?” or “what chapter of this book?”

We started Couch 2 5K this week, and ran/walked three times.  We did our pilates video one day.  We walked after dinner with Daddy most nights as well as reading from our dinnertime read-aloud: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I think we’re all enjoying it more than we expected.  This has become a nice pattern to our days. M-girl had soccer practice twice, N-boy once (Saturday morning), and R-girl’s begins on Monday.  Games don’t start until September 12, but the season is gearing up.  At N-boy’s practice this morning I planned out my October 31 Days series: “Surviving Sports Seasons Sanely.” It’ll be a wild ride!

Grovetime went relatively well.

We were a bit behind in our reading of George Washington’s World and Kidnapped, but I think we’ve caught up with that, so we can ease back on the readings this coming week.

We’ve all been enjoying – and following – A Midsummer Night’s Dream as I’ve been reading it aloud more than we did as even the Librivox audio recording.  I think both reading the names of the characters and reading a scene each day has helped with the continuity of the reading. I want to do more thinking on this, though, because sometimes those readings are long.

The children did some Index Card a Day but also did paper airplanes (guess which I prefer?) We did the assigned AO readings on Monday then filled in the rest of the week with Proverbs 1-3.  We also are reading one letter of Psalm 119 each day and will cycle through those.  We finished learning “How Firm a Foundation” as our hymn and are all looking forward to our next hymn: “It Is Well With My Soul.” I’ve waited on some of those until N-boy could manage singing parts, which he now can. Yay! (All of our learned hymns are here.)  Our Bible memory work is John 1:1-18; this week’s focus was the first two paragraphs. We went through the whole Catechism for Young Children this week.  Monday will be the last day of readings from my eBook. I’d like to start thinking about habits next.

We read about reptiles in general, then three kinds of snakes from the Handbook of Nature Study.  We learned about garter snakes, milk snakes, and water snakes.  We’ve continued with Emily Dickinson poetry and memorizing ‘Sea Fever.’ This week finished a cycle of reviewing all the poems we’ve memorized so far, so next week will be back to ‘Ooey Gooey.’  I love doing grammar and math memory work and studied dictation during Grovetime.

For our studied dictation I selected from the Ambleside Online copywork group for Year 4. We spent the week thinking about the spelling of words in the selection as well as the punctuation (commas, semicolon) and why the author made the choices he made. Then on Friday, they got a clean sheet of paper and wrote as I dictated.  This photo is of N-boy’s dictation from yesterday.

As I said, we read a section from George Washington’s World each day this week, through George marrying Martha.  I think we’ll slow down on that now, though.  We also read Proserpine from Age of Fable.  Oh, and I read too far in Madam How and Lady Why. The children were disappointed by this. We had some good discussions from this section, because I disagree with Kingsley and think that our souls are much more tied to our bodies than Kingsley indicates.  I wonder if others have issues with that section.  (I disagree with CS Lewis’ statement “You are a soul, you have a body.” too.)

Copying Catechism questions and answers.

We ended up listening to Kidnapped in the car a couple of times because I really want to keep Grovetime to 1.5 hours, and we just ran out of time. I hope this changes as we ease back on some of the readings.  I also want to get more Latin in as we only chanted two chapter’s lists each day (our current chapter and one review, moving in reverse through the chapters).  We need to move forward.

So, Grovetime happened every day this week.  We have decided that Thursday’s will be a cleaning day: home economics. A nice way to ease into the weekend and reset for the coming week.

They were planning a play, this was his costume, he came to math dressed so.

This means that math, copywork, geography blobbing, and other readings happened only four days.  But, they happened.  N-boy is working on a section dealing with symmetry.  R-girl finished up multiplying by 9s and is doing some review of multiplication and order of operations. M-girl is reviewing long division and order of operations.

The children each did piano practices and had lessons this week. Instead of a spring recital, we did recordings of them playing which I hope to have to share soon.

Thinking.

Mathematics.