Week 9 - A Clarification and Our Progress

I have always loved to reflect and evaluate how something is going.  I know I come by it honestly.  I come from a long line of evaluators.  I've been thinking about my blog a lot lately.  When most people think of blogs, they think of people describing day to day life along with all of the ups and downs they experience.  This website is not a blog, but rather our online scrapbook.  A scrapbook is for recording your favorite memories.  No one includes a sink full of dishes, World War III between siblings, potty training accidents on the carpet, or details about rebellious kids in a scrapbook.  Why?  You record the things you want to remember, and what you record influences how you remember it.   When my kids and I look back on our homeschool experience, I don't want all of us to remember my frustration with getting Luke to actually work when he's doing math, Ben's fits when his brother gets the boys' favorite plastic cup, or Olivia banging on the computer while we try to watch an educational video.   I want all of us to remember the fun projects, field trips, and family time.  I want to remember why we're doing this and how it has drawn our family a little closer together. 


Here are some highlights from our week.

Geography
Our book has finished the last three continents this week.  We read short descriptions of Australia, Antarctica and Europe.  The highlight, however, was watching YouTube travel videos about various places on each continent.  We watched videos about the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney, Rome and Antarctica.  My favorite was a video about an Antarctic cruise through National Geographic.  The kids (all three of them) watched scientists tag killer whales, penguins playing, whale bones on the shore, seals swimming, and ice falling off a glacier.  They were completely enamored.  I was curious to see what the cost of the cruise was.  It would only cost about $90,000-100,000 for our family of five.  Luke brought the change jar over and asked if we could save it towards the cost of a cruise!  Luke's favorite video was probably Rome (which really surprised me), although he was really disappointed at how difficult it was to draw pictures of the amazing sculptures from the video!

He eventually gave up on the sculptures and tried drawing an open air market instead.

The Arts
After about 2 months of requesting to paint, I finally took out the watercolors for the boys.  They will definitely be coming out again soon.  I managed to have almost an hour and a half of silence as they painted and painted.  The watercolors came with really, really small brushes, so they worked much slower than I expected on their stack of paintings.

I managed to plan a week's worth of lessons and clean the kitchen while they worked.  I was so proud of myself until I remembered  . . . .

I left a toddler alone with a cup of yogurt.

This week, I also started a new season of teaching piano.  Luke is going to be taking his first year of piano with me, but at a very slow speed and only taking lessons when he is ready and focused.  He needs a little more time to mature and develop a sense of focus before we work consistently on lessons.

Writing
We worked a lot on both creative writing and handwriting this week.  I think Language Arts is one of Luke's favorite subjects, so we've been devoting a little additional time to helping him improve his skills. 

Creative writing - Luke is continuing to work on his pirate story a little each week.  It has been a great, practical way to learn capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar while not having to work out of a workbook.


Handwriting- Draw Write Now has been a wonderful alternative to traditional copywork.  Luke has to write his sentences before he draws his picture.  He gave this picture to my parents as a gift.

Letter Writing - My cousin, Andrew, received a Life Saving commendation from the Fire Department and was in our local paper.  The boys were excited and wrote congratulations notes for him

Dear AJ, I am glad you are a firefighter!  I like firefighters.  Luke

Dear AJ, You get to be a firefighter.  Ben

(Ben's picture of AJ fighting a house fire)

Ben School
Ben has been working on the letter I.  I had great intentions to do an "I is for icky" project, but never got around to it.  Hmmm... , maybe I'll attempt it this weekend. 

Writing the letter I on the whiteboard

Number work