Homeschool Review

I think a weekly review is in order. Or, in this case, a bi-weekly review. Because you just never know when one of those little suckers might get away from you. (I'm beginning to believe that homeschoolers are time-challenged. It's not just time, as in "be there at eight in the morning" *gag, cough, gasp*, but rather the general ebb and flow of the Monday-Friday workweek, that we don't grasp. Or that could be just us. I'm okay with that.)

Here's the general scoop on life at the academy...

Latin:
Latin For Children, Primer A. Coming along swimmingly. The boys still enjoy it, and I enjoy teaching with it. We ventured off into deeper work for James this past week, doing more independent translation and writing work, while taking a different turn with John, doing more in-depth vocabulary study. This little twist to the learning curve is what makes homeschooling work so well for us. The children get what they need, without sacrificing any one child to the angry volcano of educational oversight. We'll finish Unit II this coming week, and will begin Unit III before the end of the month.

Math:
MUS, Delta: division is easy when you know your multiplication facts and the Reasons Why. Alpha: the work John put into Primer is paying off in Alpha. I'm glad we did Primer, and still recommend it highly. The gentle introduction, ease of memorization, and the taste of success (particularly for this little guy) is worth every penny spent on Primer.
As we'd planned, we're just letting them take the ball and run with it on math this term. They're both enjoying the work they do (aside from the Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Morning last week), and they still get enough bizarre applications and theory from our normal day-to-day discussion that I just can't see slowing them down or adding anything else to the pot. This is good brew.

History:
Famous Men of Rome: My plan was to read/study one famous man per week. Well, there's not much else available to us for supplementation here in the boonies. So, we've broadened our studies a bit, and read two chapters each week. I add in a little mapwork, some fictional reading, maybe dabble in a little Viking lore. Then I re-read the story of The Horatii and The Curatii, over again, each week. Because when you're six, that is just a horribly cool story.

I would like to add in more of the activities from SOTW, but at this point, I'm ready to forge ahead into the Middle Ages. It took us so long to get to Rome. Oy. Still, we're on track, and enjoying it, and at the end of this term, they'll have some good pegs about the Roman civilization on which to hang next term's studies. It's good. I'm just being impatient. And I need a live-in crafter. Desperately. These children need a few good projects. (I don't need ideas - there are plenty out there. What I need is the motivation!)

Our reading schedule has been fairly laid back, although the two older boys are getting in half an hour of assigned reading each day, as well as half an hour to an hour of free reading time during the day (on top of our normal reading together time, bedtime reading, and the random books that simply must be read whenever).

They're working their way through the Copybooks from Memoria Press. We aren't using them as prescribed, but we are using them as I'd planned, and as such, we're getting just what we need. (Copybook gives the eldest child a chance to write something I didn't outline for him, or expect him to narrate on his own. Just good, quality handwriting practice. Isn't that handy? And for the next child, it's just good practice in general: paying attention, developing good form, finishing a project with minimal fuss. Good stuff.)

Science - isn't every day a science day? No? Oh. Well, we're enjoying the tidbit pages from the list of things to do outside in the winter, and the tangents we go off on from those, alone, are great fun. We're slowly slogging our way through Exploring Creation Through Astronomy. I love the reading part. It's the activities that are just killing me right now. January, it seems, is NOT the time to ask me to do anything other than eat and read.

Bible - Pioneer Club has begun again, so we have memory work and projects for that. Our daily devotionals come from the Keys 4 Kids series, which I found at An Old-Fashioned Education. We do them over breakfast, and they're quite good. If I run into one that I don't think is applicable, or appropriate for my crowd, it's nice to be able to go back through the archives and pick a different day.

And that's the bulk of our lessons, there. We do music, although not officially. We do it by making music and sharing music. By listening to more music and partaking in the process itself. I'm trying not to focus on this, for fear I will scare myself out of it, but for now, I think that creating a lifestyle that includes music will do wonders for the boys. For all of us, really. I'll blog more later about the effects I've seen just since we've begun implementing this approach. It's been good. And by no means am I advocating NO formal music lessons, but for us, that was a cart-before-the-horse scenario. We needed to get the horse first.

How's your school term going?

Kiss those babies!
~Dy