Our Weekly Amble for August 22-26, 2016

Finally, I get to write about this week.

phew. Three Weekly Ambles in one week is a lot. I’m glad to catch up, though.

Monday was awful.

Everything took so very long. Children were still doing lessons at 6:30. Jason was coming home after bedtime. I was frustrated and upset and just do your work already.

It wasn’t even that there was too much work – although it was a slightly heavy day – but there was a lot of horseplay and avoidance and general malaise.

I know Mondays are hard. They are definitely the most difficult day of our homeschool week. Perhaps they are for you too. I think here it is because:

1. Sundays are long. We have Sunday School, Worship, family time, and Evening Worship. We generally visit afterward and eat on our way home. Late to bed means grumpy kids in the morning. 
2. Weekends are fun. We often have things to do on Saturday that are fun. We love to be with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins on Sundays. There’s a lot of running and little rest on those days.
3. We all forget. We forget the order of the day. We forget the need to buckle down and work. We have to rehash good habits. I need more coffee.
4. Daddy is gone. He goes back to work. We all adore having Jason home. We love spending time with him. We love interacting with him. And when he’s gone, it’s just harder. I have to work harder at parenting and they have to work harder at being parented. I must work at being – as Cindy Rollins instructs – impervious. sigh.

From Tuesday onward, school was done by 2:00. When I want it to be done.

We did change our start time to 8:30 am from 9:00 am. That helped with focus and just getting the process moving. We also took a walk  most days before school started:

We did Whatchamacallit every day. I don’t remember the last time we managed 5 days, but it was sweet and I do love when it goes well. We have one more week in our Session and I think we’ll be done with learning Luke 10:25-37 (The Good Samaritan). We have come to like The King of Love My Shepherd Is (Dominus Regit Es) It took a while to find an accompaniment we liked, but we found this lovely organ one. We continued moving through Training Hearts, Teaching Minds which is just the perfect length for during Whatchamacallit. We’ve been talking about propriety – in dress, words, and actions – in Laying Down the Rails. This has been a tricky subject. We read the section on dandelions in The Handbook of Nature Study and looked up the parts of flowers to better understand what we were reading. Poetry is going well, they almost have Project done and have begun working on their personal selections.  I’m struggling with mine.

This was a writing week in our loop … I was incredibly impressed with how Writing and Rhetoric walked the children through writing their own fables – which turned out very well. Today we did a five minute free write and M-girl chose to write a fable based on the butterfly and frog prompt from Bravewriter:

We practiced multiplication facts (except for today) with dice. We reviewed Latin vocabulary chants. Today we looked at some sentences from Ecce Romani I. I try to add some fun change-ups to Whatchamacallit on Fridays, just for a little variety. Same order, slightly different activities.

Our beauty loop was strong this week, working through Art Appreciation, Folksong, Handicraft, Shakespeare, and drawing today. We finished The Good Master (review to come) and began the next in the series, The Singing Tree.

We got Madam How, Lady Why out of the way first thing on Monday. This is the children’s least favorite book each week and I generally read it aloud. This week was slightly more fun because we were able to pull out our rock sample boxes that we have from the state:

We were reading about limestone deposits in England and have them here in Ohio too. In fact, there’s a quarry in our vicinity. I should try to see about a field trip.

We finished Wild Animals I Have Known. I tweeted:

My kids were saddened -& cried- in every ch of #WildAnimalsIHaveKnown and I’m glad. #meethardthingsinbooks  #empathy #AOY5 #amblesideonline

— dawn (@a_ladydusk) August 26, 2016

I’m so glad they had the opportunity to consider these things in this book. Yes, they were saddened. Yes, they cried. But we were able to discuss how it is the way the fallen world works, the needs of people to eat, see wrong and right judgements of people, and learn something about animals in every chapter. What great things to learn in a book like this.

We read several other books, obviously, but the other reading that really stood out was from Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. We read about Mount St. Michel.

Another gorgeous photo from Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. Swoon. #amblesideonline #AOY5 #charlottemason #charlottemasonliving #mountstmichel #grusomestory

A photo posted by dawn (@ladydusk) on Aug 25, 2016 at 8:48am PDT

I love the way Halliburton writes. Even the gruesome story was exciting and engaging. Part of why this stood out, though, is that some of my family were able to recently travel there and had shared pictures on Facebook which I was able to share with the children. I love when those “coincidences” happen.

We completed chapter #27 in Latin For Children A. I feel like we’re never going to finish, but I suppose it’s my own fault. The children played the flash card game in review before their quiz yesterday:

Soccer season began Thursday night with M-girls first practice. She moves up into the league with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. 8th graders are huge. N-boy and R-girl got to play on the new playground with a splash pad. They appreciated that in the 91 and super-humidity.

Overall, after Monday, it was the best week of school in memory. Yay. One more week then break week. I think we’re all ready!!