Our Weekly Amble for January 26-30, 2015

Last week we had two relatively solid days before the sickness descended.  This week we had a mix of rather light days and a couple of solid days.  I’m looking forward to next week and hoping for four really good days of lessons as it is our B week where Thursday is all car schooling, so significantly lighter.

On the big up side, other than Robinson Crusoe (which we’re are very behind on), we’re either caught up or a little ahead (I’m still trying to get my scheduling feet under me) in the AmblesideOnline reading schedule.  On the downside, I think we’ve done about four days of math lessons in the last two weeks.  And, really, that’s not enough.

M-girl’s last two Studied Dictations

This first term in Circle Time, we’re reading the AO assigned Bible readings in Joshua and Mark.  We’re using Brandy’s Prayer Box scheme – and it is working quite well.  We’re doing “Lift High the Cross” for our part-way into February because we’ve already learned the next hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.”  That’s my favorite hymn and we sing it several times a year at church.  We’re reviewing our Bible memory work, this week it was Psalm 1 and 100.  They know these pretty well.  We’re also reviewing our Catechism for Young Children questions and answers. We’re going through one page a day.  Then we sing a review hymn, this week we sang “Stricken, Smitten and Afflicted” on Wednesday (in the car), “Amazing Grace” on Thursday, and ended the week on a high note today with “Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah.”  Then, we’re reading one paragraph per day from the Handbook of Nature Study‘s section on Weather. Then, we fill out a chart tracking the weather.  I can’t imagine that they meant for me to look up the weather data on my phone, but that is what we’re currently doing.  They do look outside for some of their observations. The children are memorizing Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and we read ‘Sea-Fairies’ every day for Poetry.  We finish up working through one lesson or so a week, orally, from Memoria Press’ English Grammar Recitation.  So far we review the rules a couple of days and then practice them the next couple.  I like it.  We finish up with studied dictation, which I’ve so far selected from our Poor Richard reading.

On Wednesday, I had an appointment about 45 minutes away, so we packed up our Circle Time books and devices with music loaded and M-girl lead Circle Time while I drove.  This worked relatively well.  We listened to Act One of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the car on the way home and the children, though complaining about the language, narrated it pretty well.

As far as reading goes, N-boy enjoyed the story of the hidden rooms in This Country of Ours Chapter 31.  Those priest holes were pretty cool.  They all three enjoyed reading about the ants in Story Book of Science, this might be their favorite of the new books.  Madam How and Lady Why is going to become a read aloud because it is challenging for the younger two.  We’ve continued to enjoy reading Poor Richard at lunchtime, as of today, he is stranded in London with only 12 pounds to his name. Minn of the Mississippi is also well liked, the baby turtles are heading for the river and the crow is about to eat them … exciting.  We read that while the van was being serviced (and they vacuumed it out!)  The children worked on their geography blobbing every day.  I think they’re getting good enough at the tracing that we need to start being more intentional with how and what they’re doing the blobbing.

Once again, math was shortchanged.  N-boy has been working on fractions and today he started working on the hundreds and thousands for place value.  M-girl is working on multiplication of multi-digit numbers.  She needs to improve her multiplication facts, though.  R-girl is adding across two and three digit numbers.  Overall, they all learned some good skills for math this week. 

Copywork is going well. They’re copying Catechism Questions and Answers from the Westminster Shorter Catechism in cursive.  I like that.  Latin, on the other hand hasn’t gone as well.  I’d like to make that a big focus and finish Chapter 11 of Latin for Children A next week. We mostly just did some chanting this week.  I read the selections from Age of Fable and Long’s Geography aloud.  Age of Fable continues to be less enthusiastically received, but I have hopes that once we start the stories, it will become more beloved.  Long’s Geography was short passage discussing plains and desserts.  I don’t think it caught their imaginations and it wasn’t really new information to them.  I hope this gets better.

On Thursday, we plan to have a light, Circle Time and enrichment only day.  We looked at Fra Angelica’s The Deposition from the Cross using Brandy’s collection of prints.  We read more of Hildegard’s Gift and listened closely to ‘O ignis spiritus paracliti’ from Anonymous 4.  The children did *not* like the Art Garfunkel version of ‘Barbara Allen‘ and moaned when I said we had a version from Pete Seeger.  They liked this one much better.  We do this shortened day because on some Thursdays we have our Art with Friends group.  This Thursday we canceled because of the ice storm that came through that morning.  We tried one of the exercises from a new book at our house, Art for Kids, and it was a great success. They were to draw lines and squiggles and circles and whatever all over a piece of paper and then look to see what shapes and images they could find.  It was an exercise in using their vision in a different way:

Finally, we had the opportunity to do a bit of a Nature Walk between Organ (for N-boy) and Piano (for all) lessons on Wednesday.  We saw ice, snow, the different speeds of water and ice in the river, a birds nest covered in snow, and Eastern Sycamore Trees with their seeds hanging down.  N-boy and I used our new nature study bags, but none of us wanted to stop and draw, it was too cold!