A New Year 1/15/2011

These past two weeks:

• we finished The Witch of Blackbird Pond
• Leah listened to some old favorites around here such as: Blueberries for Sal, The Salamander Room and Make Way for Ducklings.
• Evelyn read books 1 - 4 of the Rachel Yoder series, The Smugglers Treasure and Almost Home: A Story Based on the Life of the Mayflower's Mary Chilton

• Quinn read the first two books of The 100 Cupboards trilogy, The Skippak School and he started reading Treasure Island.

• We worked on making Story Sequence Charts for The Jabberwocky. Hopefully next week I can report on how that turned out!
• We completed Lesson 4 in Who is God?

• I'm really not loving the Sonlight history this year. The book Landmark History of the American People just seems really dull and unnecessarily difficult for the ages I am teaching. I understand their defense of the book on the website but I just can't swing it. It is making history dull for us so I have gone back to The Story of the World Volume 3. Hopefully now we can make up for some lost time here! For now though we have been working on learning about the thirteen colonies.

• Quinn is working on averaging in Singapore 5b

 

• Evelyn's mental math abilities are really coming along. I have been able to help her by modeling the problems with the  base ten set and then gradually having her do steps in her head instead of with the manipulatives.

 

• Over the vacation I worked on moving all of the kids' memory work to Anki. It is a similar program to that which I use to study Scrabble anagrams before a tournament. Their memory work has been rapidly outgrowing the little recipe box over the past few years plus ANki will space out the cards based on how well the child knows the information. So far it has been a great change. I can even record my own voice for the french vocab.
• Leah has been working on making an alphabet book which involves spotting, cutting out and gluing letters and pictures from magazines. Here is a picture of her working on her 'F' page and on writing some of her letters.

• We started Volume 2 in our Bible study on the book of Acts. Currently we are in chapter 16. 

• After a half year break we resumed dictation. I placed Quinn in list 17 and Evelyn in list 31. One change I have made this time around is to have Quinn write out any missed words three times WHILE saying out loud the spelling. He usually responds well to auditory methods of learning. So far I have noticed an improvement in his ability to remember how to spell words he got wrong previously. Evelyn doesn't spell words wrong so that is a break for me. I am thinking of getting her an independent spelling program like Phonetic Zoo or something.

• We made some beautiful winter trees together. I have several art blogs that I LOVE and get great ideas from. This one came from http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/

Leah

Evelyn

Quinn

• We started Ski Club directly after vacation. Once a week we ski all day with our friends instead of doing lessons. (homeschooled kids have it so rough!) We were blessed to have someone lend us some tiny skis for Leah. As I predicted she took to it pretty quickly. The only problem now is to delay her from getting on the lift. Luckily we have several wonderful teenagers in our group who enjoy taking the little ones up! I only have pics and videos of Leah so far since I rarely see my own kids when at the mountain. I will try to get some pics of them next week.