February School

February 2020 has come and gone and with a lot under our belt.  We celebrated birthdays, we celebrated Valentine's Day with the Holt family,  and we played with friends for playdates.  We learned a lot about mummies and Ancient Egypt, as well as, pirates!    The only thing I would have put into our February School would have been black history and presidents.  I am finding that I really struggle with planning ahead on holidays.  I also need to be better at getting photos of our school days and just life in general.  

For Morning basket, we covered so many topics.  We read books from the Charlotte Mason schedule.  Learned about some people who worked hard for the kingdom of God, practiced memorizing the catechisms, and read five minute devotionals.  Our favorite read loud this month was the Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo.  This book was excellent and has become a favorite of ours.  It even inspired Ava to add some of the authors technique into her fairytale writing.  We also read some Valentine's books, Groundhogs books, and poetry.  During our morning time we find it fun to include some language arts by using MadLibs.  Since we were talking about fairytales, we did a fairytale MadLib.  We also incorporated learning about fairytales using a Fairytale Spin to Play game.  One of my favorite, and the girls, was the Once Upon a Time Map Book.  We used this for a fun spin on geography and reading map skills.  For Art, we included our Charlotte Mason artis, Gustave Courbet and we also used a Learn to Draw Princess Kingdom to go along with our fairytale theme.  Morning Basket Math included a variety of games, heart candy patterns and candy heart measurement.  For science, we played Top Trumps Fillies, foals, and fantasy.  

Here is an overview of what they learned in unit studies this month:  

Ancient Egypt and Mummies:  We read Magic Tree House Mummies in the Morning and the Ancient Egypt Fact Tracker that goes along with it.  We read Who Was King Tut biography, as well.  The girls learned about Egypt and where it is on a map, including a cut out of Egypt that they colored and placed in their composition books.  They watched several YouTube videos on the subject and we did the Waldock Way unit study on the subject.  We played Top Trumps King Tut.

We also read Magic Tree House Pirates Past Noon and the Pirates Fact Tracker, Who Was Blackbeard, and You Wouldn't Want to be a Pirate's Prisoner.  We played several pirate games

like Don't Poke the Pirate, Don't Rock the Boat, and my personal favorite Dozen Doubloons which is fun and couples with math and making addition equations that add up to 12.  Ava drew a pirate ship in her composition book and we also watched YouTube videos on the subject, watched Hook, and did the Waldock Way unit on the subject.  

For writing, we are working on the Brave Writer Jot it Down curriculum and spending our time looking into fairy tales.  This month we have looked at The Frog Prince.  We read the story and they wrote their own version of it and colored a frog to go along with it. 

Ava was able to complete several activities in her Good and the Beautiful curriculum.  

LA lessons-79-87, reading comprehension sheets, spelling, read each day independently (60 books), Reading Eggs, grammar, compound words work, homophone matching game and worked on punctuation.  

Math- 52-59, Math Seeds, addition facts to 20, candy heart patterns, candy heart measurement, color caper game, comparing numbers

Bible: Jonah 

Sally: 

LA: Lesson 10-18 in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy lessons, some beginning sound and ending sound exercises, as well as reading her Good and the Beautiful level A books, and spelling.

Math: lessons 79-87, Color Caper game, addition facts, and MathSeeds

Bible: Jonah

Evie: 

Confessions of a Homeschooler: Letters A, E, I

Math: Preschool Math Unit 1

January School

  So we are back at it!  2020 has gotten off to a good start.   Over the break, I was evaluating our homeschool and curriculum, things that were working and things that were not.  I feel as if I am always searching for different ways and new ideas to try and I am uncertain if this is a good thing or bad thing.  I know it is good to change things when they aren't working, but at the same time, I feel like it shows a side of me that is never content with how things are.  And I am also uncertain if I have enough reasons to justify the changes that I felt were needed or if I was just getting bored and losing hope thinking that things may never change and homeschool will always feel this rigid.  

It is true that I felt it was rigid.  And I did feel like I couldn't continue this way and be happy with homeschooling if we did continue the way we were going.  I still do not know if I am happy with The Good and the Beautiful literacy and math.  I love a lot of what it teaches and I think it has been great. I just haven't seen the fruit in Sally's learning.  Sometimes I feel like the math is monotonous and I don't always love it.  If I am being honest, I am feeling guilty about it because there is literally nothing wrong with it, but sometimes I feel like they take too long and there are often things in the lessons that I don't see the point of or don't like the way they have chosen to approach the concept.  The games they include need lots of pieces and they really are not that fun in my or my daughter's opinion.  I don't know.  I am unsure as to what I should do.  Why fix something that isn't necessarily broken?

So this post was originally supposed to be about our first week back at homeschooling and my introduction ended up  being more long winded than I had thought it would be.  

So this first week back I was excited about the new parts that I was bringing in but also nervous if all the planning and money I spent over it would be well received.  So far so good.  :) 

Here are just a few pictures of our first week back...
SO these first couple pictures were during morning basket.  Morning basket consists of several books that we read. Some of the books we have read so far are The Snowbelly Books, Jan Brett's The Three Snowbears and The Hat, We are reading Mr. Popper's Penguins, The Boy of the Pyramids, Dinosaur Books, Stories about Ruth in the Bible, Bible Devotional Books, Everyone Your Child Should Know, Catechisms.  During the reading part of the morning basket, the girls will work on different quiet activities.  They used these templates pictured here to make snowflakes out of cutips,  they used templates to make dinosaur out of playdough, we used trivia cards from the internet to answer questions about the dinosaurs we are learning about, we counted syllables in the different dinosaurs names, we did a dinosaur puzzle,  and we played Top Trumps Dinosaurs video games.  Some other activities we have done is work on a Frozen Mad Libs and read A Frozen Storybook together.  This time in the morning has been enjoyable and I look forward to planning some every month.  

These next few pictures we made scones and put strawberry preserves and whipped cream on them and snacked on them while we watched Tangled.  We watching Tangled to see the differences between that story of Rapunzel and the one in the Blue Fairy Book.

 Here they are doing their play dough models.

 Here is Sally reading words and jumping to the next one.

 This is when we decided to get out the watercolors and work on some artwork.

 The girls are doing the January Reading Challenge from Read Aloud Revival.  It has been fun sitting with them and listening to them read.  Ava finished her first chapter book, Polar Bears Past Bedtime.