Wrapping Up Week 30 (2015-16)
Day With the Grandparents
The kids started off enjoying the flexibility of homeschooling by spending Sunday night at my parents’ house. They had so much fun working with Grandma in the kitchen to make special treats. Elijah and Arianna explored outside, and Ian got to shoot a BB gun for the first time. He and Grandpa had a wonderful time making targets and shooting out on the property. I love that they have opportunities like this, and it was better than any lessons we could have gotten in that morning.
Approaching Holy Week
We’ve really enjoyed our daily reading in A Family Journey with Jesus Through Lent: Prayers and Activities for Each Day
Thinking Ahead… Veritas Press Self-Paced Courses on Sale!
Ian has absolutely loved going through the Veritas Press Self-Paced History Course on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation this year. All the self-paced courses on sale until tomorrow, ($100 off!), so now’s a great time to buy! You don’t have to start right away (we bought at this time last year and deferred the start date for our new school year in July), so if you think this would be a good option for your family for next year I’d encourage you to look into it. This course was one of the best decisions I made for this school year.
Elijah has been asking all year,”When do I get to do history?” I’m really excited about studying the Explorers and beginning American history next year though, so I decided to teach history myself rather than using a Veritas Press course. Instead, I decided to sign Elijah up for one of their Bible courses (on sale for $79 right now). He was pretty young when we started going through the Old Testament with Ian, so I think he’ll really benefit from an in depth study of Genesis through Joshua. I know he’s going to love it, and I’m excited that he’s going to build such a solid foundation for a lifetime of Bible learning. I’ll have Ian follow along as well, but this will be Elijah’s course officially.
Veritas Press has multiple course options for both history and Bible, so check them out before the sale ends tomorrow night!
Upcoming Reviews
We’re enjoying several products right now, so watch for these reviews in the next few weeks:
- Owlegories: The Ant, The Fruit, The Butterfly
- Essentials 2nd Edition (Multi-level reading, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary
from Logic of English) - TimesTales (videos teaching the multiplication table)
- Stopmotion Explosion Animation Kit
- homeschoolcopywork.com
- A+Interactive Math Mini-Courses
- Captain John Smith: A Foothold in the New World book and unit study from YWAM publishing
- Music Appreciation Book 1 Collection from Zeezok Publishing, LLC
- Hey Mama! Schoolhouse Planner from The Old Schoolhouse
On Monday we visited the 
,” “
,” and “
.”
The boys (and Daddy) had a great time at the First Flight field trip sponsored by the Mighty Ducks hockey team. They learned a lot about electricity and had a blast exploring the different exhibits and watching the demonstration on the ice.
Another product we’re currently reviewing is 
However, realizing that he’s almost through second grade and still is struggling with spelling (at least when he’s writing in context–he does great with lists in the “Skills Bank” on Reading Eggs), I found myself starting to feel some concern that he needed a more direct, analytical approach to spelling, something that would help him make sense of the crazy rules that make up the English language.
Ian has been a reluctant reader. He is an auditory learner, amazing me with what he picks up just by listening, but that has made him prefer audio books and being read to rather than actually reading himself. I’ve often tried to encourage him but trading chapters (or pages), but I really want to start having him read independently more. This week I introduced him to 
This week in Ian’s 
The kids and I are really enjoying 
.
by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I remember loving the Boxcar Children series as a child, but I’m not wild about some of the newer additions. Thankfully, this was one of the books written by the original author, and we both enjoyed it.
by Joann Johansen Burch. Ian was more interested than I had thought he would be, and we had no problem getting through the book in three days.
by Roald Dahl. I’ve actually never read it before, but I enjoyed many of Dahl’s other books growing up, and after a friend mentioned this one I thought we’d give it a shot.
by Eleanor Porter, just finishing it up this weekend. I wasn’t sure how a book almost entirely about one little girl and the adults around her was going to go over, but it was a big hit all around. Ian was constantly begging for more chapters, and Elijah and Arianna actually stayed and listened for most of it as well, which is unusual for them.
We also enjoyed stepping back in history with 
, which is a great DVD for learning more about the subject from a biblical worldview.
, and then the boys and I played several rounds of our new favorite, 
emergency room to stitch up Arianna after she split her chin open on our patio, followed by a complete crash of the hard drive on the computer where Ian does his 
I think I may have found a good option. I decided to go back to the curriculum I used with Ian for Kindergarten and most of first grade: 
We made our first visit to the 
set for Christmas. Eli really prefers creative construction to following directions, but I wanted him to learn about specific building techniques that he could use, so we pulled out 
to learn about different types of bridges, and each boy built one of the models in the K’NEX kit.
I’ve missed the way we used to start our school days together, so I decided to begin cultivating the habit of “circle time” each morning once again. We do our main family Bible study together with Daddy in the evenings (now that we’re through the Advent season, we’re back to 
a while back, so I pulled it off the shelf and we started in with it. Everyone seemed to listen an absorb it well, so I think we’ll stick with it for while. The page introducing January featured Jeremiah 29:13, and all three older kids did a great job memorizing that verse over the course of the week.
a few years ago. We revisited some of our favorite books, CDs, and videos about Venice and the famous Venetian composer 
(Lovely picture book that tells the story of Vivaldi’s life)
(story about a girl who sings with at the Pieta school in Venice where Vivaldi worked. Not completely accurate, but still gives a glimpse into this piece of history.)
Ian has listened to this several times a year since we first found it. I think it’s his favorite of all the titles in 
and 
(though we’ve enjoyed them all). I didn’t realize there’s also a 
to go along with the story, so I just ordered it to surprise him. (We have a couple of the others that complement the CDs in the series already and love them.)
(8-minute streaming video featuring a Venetian boy sharing about his home)
(25-minute streaming video that provides a good introduction to the city)
(This is a fascinating program about how Venice was built and the dangers facing it in modern times. I watched it on Netflix years ago, but now that’s it’s no longer streaming I bought the DVD because it’s so interesting.)
is still a little too advanced for my kids this time around (though we probably could have done some of the projects), so we stuck with 
, which has a great map in the front of it which I copied and laminated so the boys could follow along as I read the book (as well while we read 
during Circle Time one day).
, in which Patick and Beth travel to the court of Kublai Khan and meet Marco Polo. The biggest hit of the week, however, was a series I stumbled across on Netflix called 
, part of the Basher Science Books collection.
(He took care of the volcano models and spared me the mess.)