Weekly Report for January 7-11, 2013

The start of a new school year … the first week back is always a bit of an adjustment.  We all need to remember how this whole “school” thing works.  We all have to start getting up early.  We have to think about things as we haven’t been for a month and a half.  It isn’t easy.

We started the “getting up early” last week on the second.  Waking up at 7 and doing chores.  One thing I forgot was setting out tomorrow’s outfit when getting ready for bed the night before.  We added that back in this week and it makes the mornings go so much more smoothly.

Our new schedule mostly worked well.  We didn’t try to add Latin this week; I hope to next week.  Circle Time went smoothly with that extra half hour.  January is almost all review for us, though.  We sing through the hymns we’ve learned.  We review poems.  We remember where we were in Bible and Catechism.  We work on participating appropriately – and sometimes that in itself is more work than not.

Math is definitely the most chaotic part of our day.  Working through three separate math lessons in an hour is almost impossible … but it’s working OK so far.  They have some other work they can do while I work with the others – work they enjoy like logic and work they don’t – like drill sheets.  They all did 4 math lessons and a number of logic pages this week.

We worked on history two days; one reviewing King Alfred of Wessex and then talking about the Battle of Hastings and William the Conqueror.  We did map work to see how English developed by collecting grammar and vocabulary from many languages.  On Wednesday, the children read and narrated from different books.  M-girl read two stories of King Alfred the Great from 50 Famous Stories Retold.  N-boy read Joseph Lasker’s A Tournament of Knights.  R-girl read St. George and the Dragon.  They narrated and illustrated.  We did some grammar.

We worked on science two days.  Tuesday, we read about Solar Energy. The children narrated from our reading.  R-girl completed some copywork.  Today, we read a little about the moon.  We looked at a map of the moon from a National Geographic that was published in 1969 before the Apollo moon landings.  We also read about sir Isaac Newton.  M-girl and N-boy did some dictations from Tuesday’s narrations. R-girl did copywork. 

Everyone worked through three grammar lessons.  I’m relying on the book more than I wanted to; I’d like to integrate this better … at the same time I like the practice in First Language Lessons 3.

We read aloud from Opal Wheeler’s The Story of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky and listened to the Vox Music Master on Tchaikovsky.  We listened to some music from Tchaikovsky. We read “Not Lost, But Gone Before” from Parables From Nature.  We read from Pinocchio and Archimedes and the Door of Science. We read 4 of the devotions from the Heavens book. We’re almost done with Poetry For Young People: Edgar Allen Poe.

We’ve only 10 readings left in Starr Meade’s The Mighty Acts of God.  During Circle Time, we worked through Lesson 1 from Covenantal Catechism.

Overall, a very successful first week, I think.  I’m looking forward to next week!