This week, we finished up Edward Lear for poetry, and will be moving on to someone else next week. I am not sure who, though. I am finding very few poets left whose work I like enough to want to focus on reading it for the length of time it takes to memorize one of their poems. I am thinking about just choosing a poem to memorize, then reading from some poetry book each day. We have Favorite Poems, Old and New, and could mark any poems that would be worth memorizing as we come to them. I think we would like the variety. Also, there are some great poems I'd like to do, but the rest of the particular poet's work is either too hard, too boring, or whatever.
For our artist this week, we did Georgia O'Keefe. She is famous for her abstract paintings of flowers, as well as skulls and bones of cows, and the New Mexico landscape (also abstract) paintings. I wanted the girls to be exposed to her because of her fame, but we didn't really enjoy her paintings very much at all, and will be moving on to another artist this week. I haven't looked to see who yet.
We continued listening to Benjamin Britten (at least, whenever we remembered to), and will stick with him for another week, since we are changing both artist and poet.
We started reading about England and looking at the map and flag, which we put on our bulletin board. It is hard to find anything that just focuses on England, and not on the UK. We found a little book written in 1982 or so, that is really well written with some nice pictures. Even if everything isn't up to date, it is the England that I want my girls to be exposed to, with the rolling hills, quaint villages and houses, and historical districts.
For our Middle Ages History, we started If All the Swords in England, a historical fiction focusing on Thomas Becket and his time. For American, we are continuing to read Little Britches. Also, just for fun, we are reading The Search for Delicious, by Natalie Babbitt, because we like Tuck Everlasting so much. She is a really good writer, and I love reading her writing.
Speaking of Tuck Everlasting, Big Girl and I read through the second third of it this week, and have one more week to go. We used the Glencoe literature guide online to discuss what we had read. Her lesson in Critical Thinking was Eyewitnesses and Circumstantial Evidence. She did her usual Easy Grammar and math and vocabulary lessons, as well as continuing in Module 2 in biology. We started her Wordsmith writing this week. The first lesson was supposed to be to write a two page paper on "what I did last summer." But since we school all year, I changed it to something that would interest her more - horses. The idea was that it would be a very broad subject that would be too hard to write about, and she realized it immediately. But I had her do it anyway because the book says she will be taking it out and working on it throughout the year.
Little Girl did lesson 12 in MUS Delta, and did 4 lessons in her CLE Language arts. It is still really just review of stuff she already knows, so I am starting to skip lessons. I noticed the next light unit gets into things that are new. Something I did discover, though, is that she does not really know how to write a paragraph. She can tell me exactly what one is, and how it is supposed to be, but when she was supposed to write one, she didn't do well at all. She had two quotes that were unrelated. So I decided we would do just the writing lessons in her R&S 4 English book. It is just right, because the focus in this particular level happens to be paragraphs. I am thinking of adding some copywork again, of good paragraphs. We will see. As for her reading, I finally decided to just drop the light units and let her just read the stories. She was glad and said she really likes the stories. She finished up Pinocchio this week. Not sure what I will start her on next. I was going to have her read Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It online, but I am not so sure I like depending on the computer so much. I will decide this weekend.
We are still doing our Gospel harmony overview, and I really need to get planning what exactly we are going to do next. I have a basic idea to go through the NT (excluding the Gospels) chronologically using Acts, like Veritas Press does. Just got to get it all planned out.
=========================
No comments:
Post a Comment