First week of our Adventures year!

Our first week of our year of Adventures in My Father's World is finished! I think we are really going to enjoy this curriculum. It went fairly smoothly....at least, considering the added stress of house guest that was ...at times...okay, most times... distracting to the kids. I think that if it would have been a normal routine week, that the school time would have gone really well. The kids are so far really enjoying the mix of hands-on projects and stories that all pretty much relate together. The lessons are short and sweet, too -- no pointless busy work. It was just about the right amount for Ethan, also. There were several times that I had to work with Natalie on some subjects that Ethan didn't have a Kindergarten equivent of, so I gave him wiggle-breaks, when he would run off around the living room (getting the wiggles out) and then he came back when it was time for something new. He's really enjoying his MUS Primer book so far. He didn't do math every day, but three of the days this week he sat down with his math book and went through several pages each day. I'm not going to push math seatwork on him this year, but the book is there for him when he wants to do it. I had to stop him from going on to the third lesson at the end of the week.

For math, Natalie spent this week reviewing some of the addition facts, because when I spent the last couple weeks doing some review sheets with her, I discovered that she had forgotten some of the facts that I KNOW she had memorized last year. (Oh how I can't even imagine how frustrated regular school teachers get when their students are gone from math study for three months!!!) So this week we drilled plus 8's, plus 9's, and doubles (4+4, 7+7, etc). Next week we'll go through the 'doubles plus 1' (such as 3+4, 6+7, etc), and then I think we'll be ready to move on to the second half of her Alpha book on the following week.

The first part of the week, we finished up with Natalie reviewing her print letters, and then on Thursday we started cursive! She's really excited about learning to write cursive, although I had to remind her several times that I was NOT expecting perfection -- this was just an introduction to her cursive letters! She did great on the capital and lower case A's, but B's were a lot more diffcult for her, and she started feeling frustrated with it. So I just needed to remind her that she is just STARTING cursive right now; you can't expect every letter to look perfect the first time.

Ethan finished his cutting sheets that he's been working on for the past few weeks, and he began using a pre-writing book for his "handwriting" time. He has lots of lines to trace and (his favorite) mazes to pencil through. My biggest challenge for that this week was to remind him to hold his pencil closer to the tip, instead of what he sometimes tried to do, which is to keep control of his writing while holding his pencil higher up.

Here's how our "school day" went this week:

We started with our Character Building for Families studies. We finished the unit on obedience this week and moved to the next one: orderliness --something else we all need to work on!

Next we had our Bible study time, where this week was all about the importance and specialness of your name. (We are going to focus on the different names for Jesus that are in the Bible through this year, so this first week was all about getting the kids to understand the importance of their own names.) I wrote both Natalie and Ethan a letter to them, telling them what their names mean, and why their daddy and I decided to call them their names. Then on Thursday we made cookies, which they decorated with cookie icing with their initials. They are really enjoying the food aspect of Adventures this year so far. Doing food or recipe projects are something I've always wanted to add to our our homeschool time, but I've never done it much before because it wasn't scheduled in.

Then we had spelling (for Natalie only). The lessons we're doing, using Rod and Staff Spelling By Sound and Structure, so far are really simple and to the point, but include lots of phonics work and also handwriting practice right along with it. One of the biggest struggles I found last year was that Natalie would get 100% of her spelling words correct on the tests (even the really hard challenge words), but then when she would use her spelling words in "real life" situations, she would go back to inventive spelling every time. We used A Reason for Spelling for the second half of last year, which began helping with that, but the lessons were sometimes laborious, sometimes bordering on over the top busy work. Our spelling book for this year seems to be a good amount of real-world usage of the words but not too much to get annoying. Jury is still out, though. We'll also be adding in English lessons using an old book called Primary Language Lessons in a few weeks. Our curriculum doesn't throw everything at the kids all at once at the beginning.

So then next we did our geography and history time. On Monday the kids put together our history timeline that we'll be using for the whole year, and Natalie started her U.S. History notebook, which is a notebook where she'll keep all her history papers and projects. This year the focus will be on each of the 50 states, after we do a quick overview of U.S. history for the first quarter of this year. This week's focus was on basic map reading skills, which we covered in detail last year, followed by some study of Leif Ericsson and the Vikings.

On Monday night, I made an angel food cake for dessert, which the kids helped me decorate with whipped cream, strawberries, and blueberries. It was our "red white and blue" cake, to celebrate the official start of our homeschool year.

We did Science twice this week, where we read about the scientific method, and what kinds of things scientists do. They learned about how scientists ask questions, develop theories, and make observations. On Thursday we did an experiment with two glasses of water - one plain water, and the other with ten teaspoons of salt added. Then the kids dropped a fresh egg into each glass, and had to guess if the eggs would sink or float. Natalie guessed that the egg in plain water would sink, and the egg in salt water would float. Phil's dad thought they would both sink. Natalie was right.

On Friday we took the first of our weekly nature walks. We went to the Jefferson Township Community Park, and the kids picked out a tree that we'll observe once a week for the whole next year. They picked a tree that I *think* is called an American Basswood tree. It has big, heart-shaped leaves that have serrated edges. The kids think that the tree is "at least a hundred years old" (it's really tall and so wide that it took all three kids stretching around it to touch hands). Natalie drew a picture of the tree on her notebook paper, and made a few observations about it. Then we did a rubbing of a leaf, and then the kids went and played at the playground. Not for long, though. It took one trip down the slide for Ethan to discover that the slide was covered in muddy water at the bottom. Which he discovered by HIS bottom getting soaked in the mud. We went home after that.

At least school-wise, it was a really good week. It was molto-stressful for me for other reasons, not the least of which was a flu that came on me starting Thursday night. Today is Saturday. I was hoping to get my "week in homeschool review" done yesterday, but it was just a few hours ago that my brain fog started to lift enough that I was able to think enough to write a few coherent sentences!

Next week I'm hoping to get our read aloud book, The Trumpet of the Swan, finished. (This kids LOVE this book, by the way. I think they are enjoying it even more than Charlotte's Web.) I also hope to start her violin lessons and art lessons with her friend Livvy. Her violin books came last week, so she's excited to get started with that!