Our Weekly Amble for February 12-16, 2018

The first six weeks of the 2018 Academic Year are done!

It feels really good to have a solid term under our belts. Even with sickness, we’ve stayed caught up with much of our work – particularly the readings.

This week we had Whatchamacallit each morning. It really does help to start our day right. We’ve been learning “O Love that Wilt Not Let Me Go” and John 14: 16-31. We’ve moved forward on our catechesis and continued reading The Ology, which has been helpful in many places. We learned more about Doric columns, finished the Nursery Rhymes section, and talked about courage. We did some grammar and talked about question words vs. helping verbs starting yes/no questions. We laughed at a MadLib. We read 4 scenes in Comedy of Errors … there’s a lot of miscommunication going on. We didn’t do Plutarch because we did the lesson with our co-op. We read a good bit more of The Open Gate. We did a drawing lesson, read about Gershwin, and sang The Riddle Song.

xtramath

The kids did math and xtramath most days. M-girl is working on probability; N-boy is working on absolute value and negative numbers; R-girl is starting on fractions.  They finished reading Black Ships Before Troy. They learned more about Noah and the flood. In Story of the Romans, they just read about Pyrrhus and his elephants. Strabo began to work on his geographical mapping in Augustus Caesar’s World. Migrating birds face many dangers, which they learned about in our Nature Lore book. We read more about currents and elements and Galileo.

On Wednesday, we had our Art and More with Friends group. My little Plutarch group had a nice discussion comparing Chelonis and Agis and their courage and the way they stood up for what they believed was right. We made bon bon boxes and filled them with candy. The children drew trees. They exchanged the Valentines they made with their friends.

We did not do any Keeping Hour gatherings. It was crazy busy at the time I’ve determined to do Keeping Hour and, quite honestly, between exhaustion and the Olympics I wasn’t motivated myself. On Friday, we had the special opportunity to go see my niece (the kids’ cousin) compete in a local gymnastics meet which meant neither Nature Study nor Keeping Hour.

My goal for the next six weeks is to do Keeping Hour 3 times per week. I also want to better establish our EHAP for the end of the day.

I want to strengthen our end of week meetings and our Nature Study Fridays and my prereading which was spotty this term. If I could get 2-3 weeks ahead, I’d be thrilled.

If nothing else, there is always something to improve! It was a good six weeks and we’re all ready for something a little different next week.