Saturday, September 27, 2008

Weekly Update

We were all fighting colds this week so it was a slow go of things. Still we managed to stay somewhat on track.

Copywork and Bible: We continued with God's little boy and also are writing out Our Father. This goes along nicely with our Bible NIkV that we are listening to on Faith Comes by Hearing where we are in Matthew.

Math: Back to Righstart. I'm going to try and plod through the rest of book B because i think it does demonstrate things in a tangible way for Andrew. We also found a new math practice website. Variety is key for Andrew. He has money down pretty well and time is good as well although I plan to review time on 'Wacky Wednesday' next week.

Speech: We did nada, zip zilch this week. Having a cold and speech practice is just not fair to a child. We start speech back at Beaumont on Tuesday.

Science: We did some unschooling here. We read a book about frogs and also All Around You by Jeanne Bendick. We also read more about the scientific method.

Poetry, Art and Music: We read more about various types of poems specifically the limerick and villanelle. Andrew enjoyed reading though the entire book skimming for poems he enjoyed. You can see more of what we did I art here. We also did our hymn on Wacky Wednesday.

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Reading and History: Plodding through Henry Huggins. It is fun and interesting and good to listen on CD but I have to say that Andrew enjoyed much more Leif the Lucky by D'aulaire. The illustrations are very rich and the text is wonderful. We have finished that book and I thought it would take much longer. We drew an illustration of his favorite together using the techniques we learned with our art instruction. He did a wonderful job narrating the book and was quite concerned that Erik the Red was not a Christian but quite excited when Leif decided to 'take the Christian faith.' I love narration.... we get to banter things back and forth and just have fun with a book. I plan to start video book reports soon.

4 comments:

walking said...

The most exciting thing about Leif the Lucky is that there are more books just like it that I am sure Andrew will enjoy . . . :-)

Kris said...

Math could be a rough spot that will improve with time--one could go crazy changing curriculum often! I have heard many great things about MathStart.

I am curious if you have looked at MEP, the free math curriculum that a lot of Ambleside Online people use?

Basically each lesson is made up of many short activities (the Lesson Plans have them all while the practice book is for your son to write in.)

I do not try to follow their timeline. I just do however many we get to in 40 minutes (pick your time frame) and continue on the next day.

We started it this year and I am very happy with how well it teaches math thinking, not just math doing. It is not games (we have plenty of those, too.) It is more like fun math challenges that develop mathematical understanding.

My kids struggle through some of them because they are challenging, yet they love doing math.

If nothing else, because it is free, you could try some of these mixed in with what you are doing already.

HTH, and that things get better no matter what you decide to do!

Prince Andrew and the Queen Mum said...

thanks Kris. i just took a look at the link. a friend told me you have to find a curric that works for mom and kid... I think RS works for Andrew somewhat but being the 'traditional' school gal I feel we are missing a lot. as I look thru the MEP I see that we really are... nothing we can't catch up on but it could help us focus on the blans. I'm going to stick w. my RS plan and go thru and print out some curric to do from this next week. Every 6 weeks I break from our regular routine to 'fill in the blanks' and play catch up. (I also do that on Wednesdays...more practical stuff but also to catch up.) Our problem is concentration so our math sessions are very short (like 15 minutes) but we sometimes do them 2X a day. anyway- will just try and see- it's free! how can one go wrong?! oh well- what are we catching up for!

Prince Andrew and the Queen Mum said...

Tammy- i have the whole D'Aulaire packet;) i was looking at colombus and think i'll draw it out a bit and do some other things inbetween

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