School Update: Through July 5, 2013

We had a pretty good week of accomplishing lessons.  I hope to get back to regular updates of our progress in the coming weeks.

We’ve had an incredibly busy spring and early summer between three soccer teams & schedules, two baseball/softball teams & schedules, piano lessons and recital, vacation, and VBS. 

 

In June, we took a trip to the Outer Banks with Jason’s family.  On our way, we stopped at Historic Jamestown it was a great stop! We walked all over the area, learned a lot about the early settlers, saw bald eagles through a spyglass, and M-girl became a Jr. Ranger:

We took nature classes at the Outer Banks Center for Wildlife Education and saw horses on an estuarine nature hike.  I got to draw in my nature journal.

R-girl turned 6.  (How did THAT happen?!)

We had a fun week at VBS.  One of the very talented moms from our congregation wrote the whole thing which dealt with digging for wisdom and the Kings of Judah.

We’ve done lessons in and around all our schedule.  We haven’t been doing Circle Time, though.   Late nights for sports mean late mornings.  Now that our evenings are going to slow down, we have swim lessons in the morning for July.

 

M-girl is working on the last lessons in MEP Y2.  She’s been introduced to probability this week and that was fun.  N-boy is working a couple of months behind in Y2 on multiplication and division.  R-girl is working on the end of MEP Y1 and is in the calendar and time portion.

M-girl is almost done with FLL3.  She has the poetry reciting then the “extra” lessons – letter writing, dictionary skills, library skills, etc – to finish.  She’s writing excellent sentences when assigned about other studies.  She read All of A Kind Family for literature last week and has been working on Anne of Green Gables this week (woo-hoo!)  She has also been starting Dance Mat Typing.

N-boy is into the heart of FLL3.  He is doing shorter and fewer sentences, but doing a nice job with them.  He’s reading The Little Book Room for literature.  I think he’s enjoying it.  He has been enjoying the Baseball Card Adventures series by Dan Gutman for fun reading.  He is working on his penmanship; we need to keep practicing cursive.

R-girl finished FLL1 and has started 2.  She is doing mostly copywork for her writing, but her copying is nice.  I should start doing it in cursive for her and she should finish learning cursive.

We haven’t been doing much history or science, although we have done some science.  The children are swallowing MindBenders books whole.  M-girl and N-boy are finally starting to be challenged by some in Book 4. R-girl finished Book 2 and is beginning Book 3.  They’re also working intermittently on Latin and Geography.  I like that I can assign that work while I’m working with the others.  

 

We’ll probably be off Circle Time through July.  I’d like to make some changes … not in substance but in style.  Our review process has been becoming drudgery for the children (and me) so I’m thinking through how we review. I’m also tempted to make hymnbooks like Mystie does, but my printer/copier broke, so I’m still thinking.  I’ve been considering her weekly meeting schedule as well.

I’m having a hard time with uploading pictures … I have a bunch that I could’ve posted, too.