His Treasure Seekers

We’ve fallen into a pretty good routine now that we’ve finished Week 5 of this school year.  Even when unexpected things come up, we’ve been able to get through most of what I want to finish in a week.  (And I’m learning what to let go, which is huge for me!)  Here’s a glimpse at the past week:

Bible

This week we officially began going through the New Testament. (Woohoo!) Each evening we’ll be going through chronological readings with the family in Old Story New, but Ian and I will also be using Bible Road Trip: Year Three as part of our schooling.  Up until now our time with BRT has only involved matching up weeks from Years One and Two with our family devotions and doing the research (and videos) that went along.  Now we’re adding a new component to our morning reading, since BRT will take us through the New Testament book by book.

I’m currently planning to use the Lower Grammar assignments with just Ian.  I’ve thought about doing the Preschool/Kindergarten level and including Elijah and Arianna, but we already have so many picture Bible storybooks, I didn’t really want to buy the one that goes along with BRT.  If the reading load is overwhelming for Ian, however, I may end up deciding to do that.

It would be nice to include everyone in our morning Bible time.  This week I started spending some time in worship with all the children before we started our school day, and it would be easy to add some Bible reading after that before letting the little ones go off to play.  I’d like to start encouraging them to stay with us for our devotional time (even if I don’t use the BRT Preschool materials).  This week we continued reading Prudence and the Millers (Chapters 7-10) and made it through Proverbs 15:1-20.

Since this was our first official week with BRT, Ian started his new Bible notebook.  If you’ve seen any of the Bible lessons I’ve posted over the last couple of years, you know we’ve done Bible notebook pages of some sort or another since he turned 3.  This year we’re stepping up to add a slightly more academic component rather than just fun crafts, but hopefully we’ll get some of those in it too.

This week Ian started writing the names of the books of the Bible on the Bible library bookshelf page I created a while back, as well as creating a page on the “Armor of God” to go along with one of our readings for Week 1 – “What is the Bible?”.  We did this craft a while back in our Armor of God unit using the picture of the boy given with the armor, but I thought this time it would be fun to use a picture of Ian himself and include text boxes with the passage we had read.  Of course, when the others saw his page, they wanted to do their own.

The boys were in their pajamas when I whipped the camera out, which at first Ian didn’t like, but it adds some fun color to their pages so we ended up just going with it.  After taking pictures of each kid, I opened them in Paint and selected around their bodies to delete the background (so I wouldn’t waste ink).  Then I pasted the images into a Word document so I could adjust what size they would be on the page.

Math

We got through lessons 11-15 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme (Year 2).  So far Ian’s been very comfortable with it, not too challenged, and his confidence has really grown.  I’m impressed with how much he is able to do, especially considering how challenging parts of Year 1 were for him.  The only area I’m really keeping an eye on is how quick (or slow) he is with his math facts.  He’s made some improvement (and we’ve gotten in some extra practice with one of our reviews), but he could get through the practice book pages a lot faster if he knew them, and I could see him getting bogged down soon if MEP moves on and he’s still trying to count out sums for each part of the more complex problems.

Literature (Ambleside Online)

We caught up with our Ambleside Online, Year 1 reading this week, going back to A Child’s Garden of Verses for poetry and enjoying another story in James Herriot’s Treasury for Children.  I think that’s Ian’s favorite AO book so far, though he also really enjoys the Aesop’s fables.

History Cycle

This was the first week we’ve deviated from the schedule in Mystery of History, Vol.1, which spent an entire week (3 lessons) on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Since we’ve covered Old Testament history in depth already, I don’t feel a need to linger on the biblical stories in MoH.  Rather, I combined those lessons into one day of reviewing the Patriarchs, and then we moved on to Hammurabi.

Patriarchs

Since Ian already knows the stories of the Patriarchs, I wanted to focus more on the “big picture” and how they fit into the grand scheme of history.  After connecting Abraham to what we’ve read about Sumeria, we talked about his faith and the covenant God made with him.  It’s pretty amazing how this one man who lived thousands of years ago has helped shape the world for all of history ever since.

We talked about Abraham’s family line and how important it is to understanding history.  We made a family tree for Ian’s history notebook (with pasted pictures from the Homeschool In the Woods’ History Through the Ages-Collection CD with approximate dates) and read Ballad of Matthews Begats, a cute book which takes the reader through the family line from Abraham to Jesus.  (The words are even put to music in a fun song on the CD included with the book.)  At Ian’s request, we also revisited some of our favorite books and videos from the last time we studied Joseph.

Hammurabi

I read Ian the chapter about Hammurabi in Story of the World, Vol. 1 by Susan Wise Bauer.  We talked about some of his laws and discussed what was fair about them (or not).  I printed the free notebook page on Hammurabi from biblestoryprintables.com to go in the plastic page protector with the Hammurabi figure from Famous Figures of Ancient Times for Ian’s history notebook.

Science

This week in the God’s Design for Life curriculum we learned about fish.  In addition to reading lessons 11-13 in The World of Animals, we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy: Fish, Ian made a collage for his notebook, and he read About Fish by Cathryn Sill.

We started to read The Life Cycle of a Salmon by Bobbie Kalman, but Ian wasn’t as into it as he has been with other books in this series.  I ended up just leaving it out, along with The Life Cycle of a Shark, and The Life Cycle of a Sea Horse, which he enjoyed going through on his own while the others were napping.

Extras

This was our last week in the Salsa unit based on Caperucita Roja (Little Red Riding Hood).  All three older kids have learned so much from this program.  Although I usually only do the lesson plans with Ian, Elijah has started showing a fascination with using another language, and Arianna often requests to watch a Salsa video.  It’s fun to see them all learning together.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Happy Kids Songs
• UberSmart Math Facts
• “Who Created Everything” audio drama (from Wizzy Gizmo)
• Preschoolers and Peace: Homeschooling older kids with success while loving the little ones at your feet (e-book) by Kendra Fletcher

“Week 4” of school consisted of a week’s worth of lessons stretched out over about 10 days due to a family birthday (school holidays in our house), a beach day with friends, and baseball camp for Ian.  I had planned on this, so we didn’t get behind at all and we just took our time enjoying our lessons.

Bible

We skipped our morning reading time most mornings due to the extra activities and an odd schedule, so we only made it through a couple chapters of Prudence and the Millers, and then finished Proverbs 14 for our devotional reading.

As far as Bible study, we wanted to take a week to cover Esther before heading into the New Testament.  I love the story of Esther, but I was afraid the entire book might be a bit much for the boys, so we read from Egermeier’s Bible Story Book, breaking it up over several days.  Ian and I did the “Researching the Word” from Bible Road Trip: Year One, and we all watched the second episode of Buck Denver Asks: What’s in the Bible? Vol. 7 – Exile and Return, which tells about Esther.

Math

So far Ian is continuing to enjoy Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme.  I’m really impressed with how well MEP has worked for him.  There were times last year when I wondered if it was just too challenging, but the spiral approach is proving its value, and suddenly he’s understanding things and figuring out problems on his own that he was lost on a few months ago.

One of the activities in the MEP lesson plan called for matching several addition facts with their sums.  I was reminded of a game I had from when I was a teacher, and we pulled it out and enjoyed getting some extra facts practice in using “Matching Caps” from Learning Horizons.  It not only made that activity easy to do, it led a a full game of matching up facts.  Elijah eagerly joined us, and I have a feeling we’ll be getting it out on a regular basis.

It would be really easy to create a similar game using cards, and I think I might do that with specific fact families that Ian has trouble with since this game only goes up to sums of 10.

Literature (Ambleside Online)

I decided to deviate from our scheduled poetry book once again in order to complement our science study this week.  We enjoy reading more than one poem each day, so I know we’ll get through A Child’s Garden of Verses even with extra poetry books.  I just think it’s fun to include poems that tie in with other things we’re studying.

So this week we read from Feathers: Poems About Birds by Eileen Spinelli.  I wasn’t sure how Ian would respond to it, but he loved it!  He wanted to play the same game we did with Prayers from the Ark and The Creatures’ Choir a few weeks ago, where I read the poem first and he tried to guess what it was about.  This book was a little harder to that with unless you are a bird expert, but there were several that he was able to guess correctly, and he really enjoyed the book.

For our AO Year 1 readings we got to read our first story in James Herriot’s Treasury for Children, “Moses the Kitten”. I wasn’t sure how well this book was going to go over.  I bought the audiobook a while back and have tried to listen to it in the car on several occasions, but the boys always lost interest really quickly.

This week, however, I pulled out the book and snuggled on the couch close to Ian so he could see the illustrations.  He loved this story about a tiny kitten found near a pond on a farm in England.  When we got to the part where the farmer’s wife has named him Moses, I paused to see if he would react when I read,

“Moses?”

“Aye, you found him among the rushes didn’t you?”

It took a second, but then his eyes lit up and I heard a little chuckle.  He liked that connection.  When we had finished, he begged me to read another story from the book, but for now I want to stick to the schedule and keep him hungry for more.

History Cycle

I think pretty soon we’re going to veer away from using Mystery of History, Vol.1 as our framework, but for now it’s still helping provide just enough structure.  This week we covered Stonehenge, Early Egypt and the Minoan Civilization.

Stonehenge

When I told Ian we would be talking about Stonehenge this week, he instantly knew what I was talking about.  Grandma just returned from England and we got to see pictures of her there, and Ian told me that in one of the Lego movies he’s watched they talked about “LEGOhenge,” so he knew all about it.

Well, maybe not ALL about it.  We both learned a bit more by reading parts of two books I borrowed from the library: Stonehenge (Torque: The Unexplained) by Sean McDaniel (a great introduction to the subject, though I skipped the part about the alien theory) and Stonehenge by Cynthia Kennedy Henzel (which I preferred, even though it had more information than we could cover in just one day).  Then we watched this 3-minute clip from TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting that shows the Duggar family visiting Stonehenge.

Early Egypt (Old Kingdom)

Ian had been eagerly looking forward to this lesson so he could make the Khufu (Cheops) figure from Famous Figures of Ancient Times by Cathy Diez-Lucky.  We read bits and pieces from several books about Ancient Egypt to learn a little more about Khufu’s Great Pyramid.  Ian is familiar with the name because he has listened to Jonathan Park: The Whispering Sphinx multiple times.  It was helpful for him to see both a map of Egypt indicating where major historical sites are and a timeline showing the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms.

We’ve spent a lot of time learning about Ancient Egypt and pyramids in the last couple years so I didn’t really linger on this lesson.  We read The Egyptian Cinderella, and Ian liked the connection with Aesop mentioned in the “Author’s Note” at the end of the book.  He also enjoyed reading through Ms Frizzle’s Adventures: Ancient Egypt with Daddy.

The Minoan Civilization

We read about the Minoans in Mystery of History, Vol 1 and Story of the World, Vol. 1 (Chapter 18) by Susan Wise Bauer.  Ian really enjoyed hearing about the bull-leaping, and when he started reading about Theseus and the Minotaur, he got excited and said he already knew the story.  It turns out he had read it on Starfall in a collection of Greek myths.  I love when we get to build context for things that are already familiar to him.

Science

This week in The World of Animals (part of the God’s Design for Life curriculum) we read the lessons on birds.  Ian made a bird collage and did the curriculum worksheet on the bird’s digestive system for his notebook.

To explore the subject a little more, we read About Birds by Cathryn Sill (paying specific attention to the different kinds of beaks the birds have) and Life Cycle of a Bird by Bobbie Kalman.

We also watched two episodes of Bill Nye the Science Guy: Birds and Flight.  Ian picked up a book of science experiments called Air, Wind, and Flight that another homeschool family was giving away, and he enjoyed trying several of the experiments, saying, “This would go really well with our science study, Mom!”  I guess he thought I’d need convincing to let him go at it on his own.  He didn’t necessarily do them all correctly, but he had fun, it was a good learning experience, and he was really proud to show his work to Daddy that night.

Extras

In Spanish we moved on to the next Salsa video, #112, which is the last story in this set on Red Ridinghood.  We used Arianna’s dollhouse figures to practice family members and various commands, like “Salta con la abuela” (“Jump with the grandmother”) and “Anda con el niño” (“Walk with the boy”). Ian always thinks these are fun.

Summer is slipping away quickly!  We’re no longer the only ones doing school, and we’re looking forward to some fun outings once the public school kids go back and crowds thin out a bit.

Upcoming Reviews

We’re currently getting familiar with the following products.  Watch for reviews soon!

• Happy Kids Songs
• UberSmart Math Facts
• “Who Created Everything” audio drama (from Wizzy Gizmo)