My Life

Weekly Report

Our first week of school is over. For the most part, I think it went well. My apologies for no pictures. As you can see below my camera takes horrible pictures and quite honestly, I was busy teaching the kids and forgot to grab the camera.

Bible Study ~ I'm still trying to figure out what to do for this. We didn't do any this week. *gasp*

Latin ~ This year I have one doing Prima Latina and two doing Latina Christiana. I had lesson plans done not realizing this so reorganization happened quickly on Monday. It seems what works is to go over the LC lesson on Monday, PL on Tuesday, all three do their workbook pages on Wednesday, and review on Thursday. So far so good with Latin.

History ~ LOVE Tapestry of Grace. Love. It. We are using Year One, Unit One right now. The first week is an introduction to ancient Egypt and the Nile river. If you aren't familiar with TOG it is a multi-level curriculum and covers several subjects (i.e. Vocabulary, Geography, Bible/Church history, Reading, Writing, Arts/Crafts, Philosophy..for high school, etc.) . I am trying to use as much of it as we can but there is a bit we just don't have time for (and they come right out and say that there is a lot and it's hard to cover it all). We talked about the geography of Egypt, the "gift of the Nile", realizing/remembering that this was the culture Moses grew up in, learned new words (do YOU know what a shaduf is??), and began work on a salt dough map of the region.

Poetry ~ This is a tough subject for me to teach. I hate poetry. I am not good at it. I do not enjoy writing it. I don't really enjoy reading it. But my children need to be exposed to it and learn something about it. The book we are using this year seems to be pretty straight forward and easy. The older two girls share my dislike of poetry, however, the 3rd grader seems to really love it! It took her about five minutes to write her onomatopoeia poem. The older girls are still working on theirs a day later.

Science ~ Like Latin, this is a subject that I have them split for the first time. Emily is using Apologia this year, her first "big scary textbook". She was intimidated about it at first but now that she's started, she says that she's really enjoying it. :) The other three are doing Earth & Space. We had fun this week talking about the Earth. It's formation, location in space, and the layers. To demonstrate the layers we made an "earth" out of playdough. A small ball for the core, add playdough to it for the outer core, etc. until you get to the crust. Now that I really should have taken a picture of!! The last time we did some earth science (two or three years ago) we did an edible earth. It was #1 A MESS and #2 hard to show the layers and #3 a mess. Using playdough was much better!! We used dental floss to cut it in half to expose the layers.

After lunch the kids do their individual book work. I quickly came up with a flow chart of sorts on Sunday after I realized there is only one of me and four of them. The idea being, I can give undivided attention and instruction to ONE child while the other three don't need it. It worked great Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. For some reason on Thursday they decided to do their own thing. After dealing with, "Mama, I need help...." from one and "Can you help me????" from another about 5 times while I was trying to help Emily with her Vocabulary (a new vocab. book I might add so we're both figuring it out) I announced, "On Monday, we WILL be using that chart I made up. This can not happen. I can not help all of you at once. Right now I am going to help Emily and you will have to wait until I am done." Yeah, it was a rough day.

They did really good with their book work. Emily has two new curriculums this year, Vocabulary and Intro to Literary Analysis. She has a heavier work load which I am hoping won't overwhelm her. Since we don't do school on Friday (I see clients on Friday) we have a day to catch-up if needed. She was the only one who needed a bit of a catch-up day. It will be good for her though....learning to manage her time. ;) Matthew seemed to enjoy his work. He loves Math and got bored with Handwriting on Wednesday and Thursday. When I asked him Wednesday if he wanted to do it, he replied, "Uh...noooo. School is just so..so..weird!"

Overall I think it went well. The biggest challenges I see are History (how much we have time to cover, how to space it out over the week, etc) and the flow of afternoon work. But we'll get it figured out and will be in a groove in no time. :)