Well, it's been two months. But I'm back. I have a few pictures, but still need to get better. Anyway.....

Noah and Emma are continuing in their American History studies. Right now they are studying the Revolutionary War. They made maps of Washington's journey from Trenton to Princeton and constructed a tower like Francis Marion built to fire onto the British, even though he was outnumbered. Our character studies were about initiative, so we discussed how the leaders in the war had to think outside the box in order to meet their goals. Emma and Noah are working on their own character in this area as well, and I have seen them both doing things around the house, for friends, and even strangers that show they truly are working on taking initiative.

Savannah is getting further into the Middle Ages. She is enjoying her studies, but she is particularly liking her Shakespeare study. She is learning a lot about his plays (don't worry, she's not reading the actual script yet. Just studying at an overview level. We will save the "real stuff" for when she's older). She is learning about the general idea of each play and the time and story and what was going on in real life at the time of each play.
She is also learning about the Muslim religion now and how it got started. She just wrote a paper on Mohammad's vision in the cave. She does well with her writing assignments, but she would much rather write free style than follow the instructions for the actual assignment---of course, no one is surprised about that!

Lydia and Nora are of course working mostly on their basics. Their favorite thing though is our read aloud/pre-literature study. We have been reading the Thornton Burgess books (yes, the really, really old ones----they just don't make good literature anymore!!).. Right now, we are reading The Adventures of Chatterer the Squirrel. They love to hear the stories, and they especially love the days that they have to act out the chapter after we have read it.

Josiah is mostly getting lost in the shuffle the last few weeks as far as school work. He's still learning letters and such, but we haven't done sit down workbook stuff with him for a couple of weeks.

I can't get the pictures to post like I wanted to, so I can't do the captions. So.....Nora is "jumping" up and down on the bed (on all fours) while she does her flash cards. This is what she does every day. She does not like to do them sitting still, so this is what we do. She's actually much faster this way........Savannah is baking bread for her weekly project. The loaves have bible verses cooked into them that all talk about Jesus being the bread of life. The bread was pretty good! Lydia was "helping".....Noah is doing science---looking at the leaves and studying their characteristics. I think this was the lesson on the stomata (the breathing holes).

As we go....

Well, I only got around to taking two pictures since starting this.

Josiah is still liking his school books. He is doing some "before" explode the code books, and a number book, and we go over his speech, but his favorite thing is the mazes (prehandwriting). He started out not staying in the lines too well. But now, he has better control of his pencil. Of all the kids, he has been by far the latest to "blossom" in this area. He is getting pretty good at writing his name though.

Lydia is coming right along with reading and math. It's hard to say what she likes best. For her "alone with Mom" work, she does reading, math, handwriting, explode the code (a phonics book), and a thinking skills book. I let her stack the books each day in the order that she wants to do them, and the order is always different each day.

This week, Nora and Lydia did several science experiment/activities (I should have gotten a picture of it--hopefully I will get better at that). Our Bible verse for the week was John 3:16. We talked about the spread of the good news. They learned that Christianity spread quickly across the Roman Empire because they had the first system of roads that made travel easier. So we made a "Roman Road" with graham crackers and they made their little people (they actually used little pet shop animals---but for us, they were people) go up and down the road telling of Jesus. We also talked about St Augustine---how he was a great teacher, but had not always been good. One night, he and his buddies went out looking for trouble and stole pears off of a neighbor's tree, but it turned out the pears were bitter when he was expecting them to be sweet. So our science lesson was on the sense of taste. I sat out small piles (without them seeing what was what) of sugar and salt and also hot chocolate mix and unsweetened cocoa. They weren't sure which was which, so they saw how what you expect to taste makes a big difference in what you actually taste!! It was fun.

Savannah, Emma, and Noah are doing well also. But I will save stuff to write for them next time.

2011-2012 School Year

We school year round (with plenty of breaks, of course!!); but Mom wanted a "Back to School" photo for her company newsletter, so I thought I'd post it here too! Crazy bunch o' youngins!!

Don't Get Too Excited!

Ok. I'm starting a blog......again. Don't get too excited. We all know how the last one turned out. I can't even find that one, so I'm just starting fresh. This will mostly be dedicated to our "home school" life, but of course that spills over to everything else. So it won't be all academic, but that's the main purpose. So....here goes nothing!