Wow! It's been two months since I posted last. I just got tired of posting our weekly reviews, since they were basically the same old thing week after week, with different books. Not exactly exciting to read or anything.
Little Girl is almost finished with the CLE level 4 math. I LOVE this math! If I had another child to homeschool, I would definitely start at the beginning with it. It covers so many things that you "think" you will cover in "real life," but never actually happens. At least, not enough to actually learn it. She is also just about finished with the 7th grade CLE Language Arts. Since they only go through 8th grade, I have slowed her down to a half lesson per day. That leaves her more time to work through the math and to read. She is still doing the Apples 2 Spelling workbook, skipping through some unnecessary pages, and the Vocabulary Vine book. She is also reading the BJU 8th grade Literature book, just one story per week right now. She still keeps several other books going at a time, as well as her Nature Friend magazine. She just finished Black Beauty and The Wind in the Willows.
Big Girl is still working through the Abeka Consumer Math book and the Story of Art book. She is also reading A Ready Defense (with discussion and discernment), and the Clarence Carson history book, as it goes along with our main history, Uncle Tom's Cabin (as am I), A Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, and A History of England by Dickens.
For history, we have dropped Tapestry of Grace. I just did not like the way we kept going back and forth in history, instead of completely chronological. I know everything can't be perfectly chronological (as when you read a biography, that person's life will cover a lot of ground), but it could be much better than most history programs do it. I started to pick Truthquest back up, but it has the exact same problems. We do not like studying history in units that cause you to go out of order, like most history programs (actually all I have looked at) do. So, I have been creating our own. We are still in the 1800s, taking it a decade at a time. I use a couple online timelines, as well as a few books I have here, and we cover a decade in 2-4 weeks, depending on how much happened during that time period that we want to study. I went through several book lists I found (along with All Through the Ages and Truthquest guides) and listed out all the most recommended books for our century first. I narrowed them down to ones we own or could get at the library. Then I put an approximate date by each. If we want to study something or someone we don't have a book listed for, we just see what we own or the library has on that topic.
We are basically reading chronologically through that book list, along with reading Abraham Lincon's World, the Scholastic Encyclopedia of the Presidents, The Pictorial Encyclopedia of American History, The Defining of America (PAC), and utilizing BJU world and U.S. history texts where we want extra info or can't find it anywhere else. We usually have a biography or two going, as well as a historical fiction and a few nonfiction books on the period. I simply figure out what readings are about the decade we are studying and divide them up and read a bit of each book daily. We all are enjoying this much better.
I am trying to do some of my own reading lately as well. Currently (besides the Bible), I am reading Uncle Tom's Cabin on the Kindle, More Than Conquerors by Hendrikson (don't think I agree with his viewpoint, but wanted to read a good book on it anyway), and Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I may do some short reviews on these soon.
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