March 28, 2012

My mom has decided she is not ready to leave her house yet and she moved back yesterday.  I can certainly understand where she is coming from.  She was completely dependent on us to go anywhere and I think that was hard for her.  I was sad to see her leave but I totally understand.  I would guess she may come for a few days to visit here and there, when my brother or sister are busy or out of town or something like that. It helps knowing that my brother is now living with her so she is no longer alone.

The boys are both doing very well.  We are ahead of schedule in school and the boys are both doing great with it.

We are really enjoying our history and science lessons these days.  We have started doing them in the mornings, before our break, as we do a better job on these subjects then.  We are now using Story of the World (SOTW) as our main history book (or 'spine', as the homeschooling community refers to it).  We use the SOTW Activity Guide for doing our comprehension questions after we read the text and also for the map work.  The Activity Guide provides a coloring page and the boys enjoy coloring while I read.  I keep a list of library books recommended from SOTW and also from Tapestry of Grace (TOG) and I order them ahead of time.  We read as many of these as we have time for and find interesting also.  We choose a project from either SOTW or TOG and do them here and there along the way, not every week because we also do projects or experiments in science, but when we have time.

In science we just finished studying a section on our solar system.  I purchased a set of Styrofoam planets, sun and rings from a local store and we spent a day painting them, using pictures from this wonderful planets book we have as models.  After they dried, we hung them down the long hallway upstairs, using a guide for an approximate scale to determine how many inches or feet each would be from the sun.  The boys had so much fun with this.  They especially enjoyed the first half hour or so of the painting (and then it was up to me to finish it, although Ben actually helped most of the time) and they really enjoyed measuring the distance from the sun for each planet and double checking it to what I had written on my list.   It is not perfect but it is good enough that both boys were totally impressed at how far away from the sun many of the planets are.  They also seemed to take personal exception about the decision of Pluto no longer being a planet.  Neither of them are willing to accept that at this point and they have some pretty strong feelings about it.  It was actually kind of funny.

All of our other subjects are going just fine.  Right now I believe history/science and spelling are their favorites.  They also enjoy doing narrations, where I read to them, ask them questions and then have them tell me something they remember about what I read.  Ben loves practicing his cursive.  Nick does not love it but he does an excellent job.  I recently picked up a 5th grade reader so they are practicing reading from that aloud to me 1 to 3 times per week or so and they are doing very well with it.  We only have one final chapter in our phonics book and it is a short chapter for learning to read very long, multiple syllable words.  They had some of these in past chapters but the last chapter goes on to include even silly ones, like su-per-cal-i-fra-gi-lis-tic-ex-pi-al-i-do-tious....(spelling? - you know, from Mary Poppins).  That is the very last word they read in the phonics book.  We will get to that last chapter eventually but I'm not too concerned about it because we will also be covering multiple syllable words in spelling.

Well, our quiet time is over so I need to sign off an fix lunch.  Hope you are having a great day.