UPDATE

Well, we have only done one full week of school since the last post. Birthdays and doctor appointments.

We have continued to read through the New Testament in basically chronological order. We will be starting Philemon next. Also, I have decided that I will start requiring the girls to read out loud from the Bible each day, and to explain what they have read. We will start in Psalms, doing one at a time, or part of one for the longer ones. It will be good for their speaking ability, as well as their thinking skills in figuring out how to explain the meaning.

We finished up Jekyl and Hyde, and have started a Frankenstein adaptation. Then we will read The Deadliest Monster, for worldview.

We read a book on George Washington Carver, and are currently reading about Helen Keller.

For math, Big Girl is continuing in her LBC book, and Little Girl has been working on her multiplication tables and a couple long division problems each day that we had school. We will do a new lesson next week. She doesn't have much left in her MUS book, then we will do LOF fractions.

Little Girl is still working through her CLE Language Arts, and is in the 9th book. Big Girl has resorted to only reading through her writing book, as she just wasn't really getting anything out of the writing assignments. Next week, I am going to start having her just write something each day, and we will go over it. Big Girl is working through her spelling words a bit at a time. We tested through the SWR book and wrote down all the words she missed in a notebook. We will work on those words a few at a time, using Spelling City online, as well as analyzing the words.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

I am getting lazy about updating this.

Last week, we read from Ephesians for Bible.

We have been reading poems by Edgar Guest, though we are not memorizing any of his.

We started reading about Sweden this week for our country study/geography.

For our artist, we have started on Da Vinci.

We are still reading about Marco Polo, and the girls read books on Booker T. Washington. We also are reading Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, as well as a story book on economics called The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible.

=========================

UPDATE

We are having a "light" week this week, since tomorrow is Big Girl's birthday. We have been reading about George Washington Carver for U.S. history, and Marco Polo for Middle Ages.

We started Fra Angelico for our artist. I'll be glad when we get through these Roman Catholics who painted nothing but graven images. Ugh.

=========================

UPDATE/ LATE WEEKLY REVIEW

I didn't get around to doing a weekly review this past weekend, so I will catch up now.

For Bible, we have finished up both Corinthian epistles, and started on Romans today.

For poetry, we are still reading from a poetry book each morning. The one we are using now is called The Best Loved Poems of the American People. I found it at Goodwill.

We are still reading about Norway for our geography/culture study.

We started a new artist - Jan Van Eyck. The girls like him a bit better than Giotto.

Last week, we read a biography of Nelly Bly for U.S. History. We also started reading Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne. This week, we started a biography of George Washington Carver.

For Middle Ages, we are still reading Adam of the Road and The Wonder Clock, and reading from our spine books, a bit each day.

=========================

THINKING AHEAD A BIT

I made a list this morning of the things I want to cover with Big Girl over the few years she has left of "school." I have been thinking a lot of what our ultimate goals are, and of the fact that what we do does not have to (and really should not) look anything like traditional school. If she ends up wanting to go to college, it will surely be a community college where she will simply have to take a test to get in. At this point, she has no such aspirations.

I am a big believer, as I have said before, of playing to the girls' strengths, instead of focusing on their weaknesses. God has made each of us different, with our own gifts and interests. Not everybody was created to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a scientist. Very few were, actually. Big Girl's strengths are in reading, writing, and creating. She is not a math or a science person. For math, she will finish up the Lial's BCM she is halfway through right now. Then, some time before she graduates, we will do a consumer math. That is all the math she will ever need in "real life."

I do want to do an economics overview with her, using the Richard Maybury books we already have, as well as perhaps the Abeka book my sister gave us.

As for English, she will finish up her Wordsmith she is doing, then do the Wordsmith Craftsman book, which has more practical "real life" writing instruction. Either that, or Jensen's Format Writing. I'll have to look over them again. At some point, we will go through Our Mother Tongue, which we already own, for a grammar refresher. I also want to go through a couple spelling reference books with her that we have here.

After she finishes her Apologia Biology, I think we are going to get a couple of homesteading books and do a sort of course on homesteading and gardening. I also want her to have some basic first aid and nutrition education at some point. Neither of those will take long.

For the really important stuff, we will go through Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, as well as some worldview books, one being a John MacArthur book I already have.

She will continue history with her sister, as already planned. Besides all this, there are about a billion really great books I want her to read. :-)

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

The only thing different for this week is that we started reading a Landmark book on the Wright Brothers for U.S. History.

I did decide to keep moving with Middle Ages History while we are reading through the two fiction books. Just some readings from spines this week.

I think I forgot to mention when we started studying Ireland. Well, we finished it up this week. We will be starting Norway next week.

=========================

TYPICAL DAY

I thought it would be neat to do a post on what a typical school day looks like for us right now. We don't have scheduled times for anything, but simply a basic order of things to get done.

About 6:30, Big Girl likes to go ahead and get up and get a head start on her independent work (usually vocabulary and math).

About 7, we wake up Little Girl, and they eat breakfast while I read the Bible to them and we discuss what is read. Then they go brush their teeth and get their hair brushed.

If the day is going to be hot, we go ahead and walk the dogs. Sometimes, we wait and do some reading first and then walk, or when the weather is cooler, we don't walk until after lunch.

The girls do their memory work, usually poems, but recently, the books of the Bible.

I read from a poetry anthology.

We look online at paintings from our current artist, or sometimes read about him, either online, or from a library book.

We either read from a book, or look at websites on our current country we are studying.

We listen to a song by our current composer, or read about him. Currently, we are going through the Themes to Remember books, so it is different things and people each day.

We read our little book about the elements of the periodic table, then look at some videos and websites on the "element of the day."

I read from our current history books, usually one chapter from each, and we usually have at least 2 going at a time, sometimes more.

I read from our current "fun" book. Usually a chapter.

Little Girl does her math. She is currently working a few problems in her book, then practicing her multiplication tables with games on the computer.

Big Girl works on her independent work. Math, vocabulary (if she hasn't finished it), science, history reading, and writing.

Little Girl does her language arts lesson.

Little Girl does her dictation for spelling.

Little Girl does her current spelling words on Spelling City, a website.

Little Girl does her independent reading, usually 3-5 books, a chapter a day of each.

Little Girl practices her typing.

Big Girl and I work on our Spanish lesson.

Big Girl does her spelling.

What is amazing is that we usually get all this done by lunch. Sometimes we have a few things to do afterward, but not often.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Back to work this week. We are in 1 Corinthians in our Bible reading. The girls have pretty much memorized the books of the Bible in order. We have just been reading a book of poems for our poetry, instead of focusing on a particular poet. For artist study, we are still on Giotto. We found a big book on him at the library and I use one of his online paintings as my computer desktop every couple days. The girls look at it and discuss it. For our composer study, we have started the Themes to Remember books and cds. We will finish them before starting back at the "beginning" with our composers one at a time.

We finished up our book on Thomas Edison this week. We started two books for Middle Ages: The Wonder Clock and Adam of the Road.

Big Girl and I finished our second lesson in Spanish.

Little Girl is close to the end of her Math-U-See Delta book, and we are taking a break of sorts to work on her multiplication tables. She already knows many of them just from use, but we are using some online games and one I downloaded to really learn them well before moving on. Meanwhile, she does a couple long division problems each day to keep that fresh. When she finishes Delta, she will move right into the Life of Fred Fractions book.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Well, the girls both ended up with really bad colds, so we took this week off too, except for our reading.

For Bible, we finished Galatians and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. The girls just about have the books of the Bible memorized.

For U.S. history, we started a book on Thomas Edison. For Middle Ages, we read The Whipping Boy.

Big Girl and I did our first lesson in our Berlitz Spanish book this week.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

We took off this week except for reading. We finished up Otto of the Silver Hand, and read a book on Louis Pasteur. We also finished up the Little House book we were on, and started The Long Winter.

Our Berlitz language books came. The French one isn't nearly as good as the Spanish and German ones. It doesn't even indicate which syllables should be stressed in any way, like the others do with all capital letters in the stressed syllable. Nor does it have a pronunciation guide of any sort at the beginning. Of all of them, the older edition German one is best.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

We started with an introduction to Galatians this week, and will be reading that next for Bible.

For U.S. history, we watched a film about Madame Curie and read some more from the scientist book we have been going through. We also read Drake Drills for Oil and a book about the making of the Brooklyn Bridge.

For Middle Ages history, we started Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle. Big Girl also read The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian by Lloyd Alexander.

For free reading, Big Girl read The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin.

I ordered the Berlitz Self Teacher for Spanish this week, and Big Girl and I are going to give Spanish another try. I also ordered the French one, and we already have the German one, just for fun. If we make it through the guide, then I will see about ordering us an actual curriculum.

Just a side note: None of the covers on these books (except the Spanish one) look like the ones in the links. I hate these modern covers they put on everything now. Makes the books look cheap and trashy, in my not so humble opinion. If I were judging by the covers, I'd have skipped over them.

=========================

POETRY

We have been memorizing poetry for quite a while now, and as I said elsewhere, we focus on one poet at a time while memorizing his or her poem. I will read a poem each day by the particular poet we are studying. We keep the memorized poems, along with the pages I make for the bulletin board (with the poet's picture, country, and birth and death dates) in a notebook. The girls review the old poems by each of them reciting one each day. We do those the same way we do our current memory work: Big Girl will recite the poem while Little Girl looks at it and corrects any mistakes, then they switch. I started doing this when I realized that I was memorizing the poems myself just by looking at them and correcting the girls when they would recite them. So it serves double duty.

Here is a list of the poems we have memorized so far with their authors. At first, we did simpler ones, that were mostly by poets who wrote specifically for children. I tried to choose the most "important" and well known poems and poets. Here is the main site I use as our source.

Ooey Gooey - Anonymous

The Germ - Ogden Nash

The Vulture - Hilaire Belloc

It's Dark in Here - Shel Silverstein

The Land of Counterpane - Robert Lewis Stevenson

How Doth the Little Crocodile - Lewis Carroll

Some One - Walter de la Mare

Silver - Walter de la Mare

Hurt No Living Thing - Christina Rossetti

The Duel - Eugene Field

Jabberwocky - Lewis Carol

I Chased a Dragon Through the Woods - Jack Prelutsky

The Tyger - William Blake

Trees - Alfred Joyce Kilmer

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Paul Revere's Ride - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (only did part of this one)

O Captain! My Captain! - Walt Whitman

Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred Lord Tennyson (half of this one)

Daffodils - William Wordsworth

Eldorado - Edgar Allan Poe

Because I Could Not Stop for Death - Emily Dickinson

Old Ironsides - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost (my favorite poem and poet!)

The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

Daddy Fell Into the Pond - Alfred Noyes

The Owl and the Pussycat - Edward Lear

The Spider and the Fly - Mary Botham Howitt

The Arrow and the Song - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

And if anyone is wondering "Why memorize poetry?" Here are some good articles. I don't agree with everything in them, being a Christian, but there is some good stuff to be pulled from them. The "disagreeable" parts will be obvious to other Christians. (Just philosophy type stuff.)

Poetry Memorization

In Defense of Memorization

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Well, we ended up going with another poet after all. I found this cute book in the Goodwill, by T.S. Eliot, on which the musical, Cats, is based. We will be reading through it, and some of his other poems, before we get back to our anthology. We won't be watching the musical, however, as I hear it has inappropriate content. What a shame.

We started with Aaron Copland this week, and will be continuing for another week, before doing a couple more modern composers I decided to go ahead and cover while we are "here."

We will be starting on Ireland for geography this coming week. Also, we will be going back to the beginning and world artists now, after spending a year or more on American artists. We will start with Giotto. I don't care for a lot of his paintings, or many of the others from this time period, due to their portrayals of Christ. But we cover them because of their significance in history, though I will be very picky about which paintings we focus on.

Big Girl finished up her Easy Grammar Plus last week, and will be taking a break from grammar for a while to work on her writing, which she loves.

For history, we finished up our book and a video on Alexander Graham Bell. For world history, we read some about France and Germany during the Middle Ages, and Frederick Barbarossa. Big Girl is reading The Red Keep, by Allen French.

In Bible, we finished Acts, and have started the book of James. Also, for memory work, since we aren't doing a poem right now, we are going to memorize the books of the Bible in order again. Big Girl still remembers most of them, but Little Girl doesn't even remember ever doing it the first time.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

We finished up Robin Hood this week, and will be starting The Red Keep next for Middle Ages history. We started Mr. Bell Invents the Telephone for U.S. History, along with a book called Scientists Who Changed the World, which is a compilation of about 20 different scientists and inventors.

We are continuing with our little book on the periodic table, but only doing one element a day, along with looking at some online videos about them. We are also looking at this periodic table which is linked to Wikipedia.

I don't know if I mentioned, but our country we are on right now is Scotland. Interestingly, both Alexander G. Bell and Andrew Carnegie (who we just finished reading about) were from Scotland. Likewise was Sir Walter Scott, whose books Big Girl has been enjoying lately. We didn't plan that, but it just worked out that way, as so often seems to happen. :-)

For our poetry, we are just going to continue reviewing our old poems daily, along with reading from an online compilation of poetry. If I come across a poem I want them to memorize in our daily reading, we will do it, instead of covering any more poets specifically.

As for our artist study, we are finishing up Rockwell, and I don't think I am going to cover any more of the moderns. None of us enjoy many of them anyway. We will take a short break and then go back to the beginning.

With composers, we will be starting Aaron Copland this week, and he will be the last modern composer we will cover. Then, we decided, we are going to go through the 3 Themes to Remember books we have, one at a time, until we are finished. Then we will go back to the beginning, and do one at a time again.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Our new composer this week was George Gershwin, most famous for his Rhapsody in Blue. We are going to hang out on Longfellow for a bit longer, even though the girls have pretty much memorized the last poem. We finished up a couple books this week, and started a little fun book about the periodic table. We will just read a bit of it each morning.

Big Girl started her word lists in SWR this week. All the words are words she knows so far, to get used to the marking system and rules.

Big Girl read The Talisman, by Sir Walter Scott.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Not too much new this week. We did start memorizing The Arrow and the Song by Lonfellow. Also, in our study of Acts, I decided to just read straight through Acts first, so as not to break up the flow, then read the rest of the NT in chronological order.

Big Girl finished setting up her log for SWR. We will start the word lists this week.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Back to school this week.  We started a new composer, Sergei Prokofiev, most famous for Peter and the Wolf.  We started reading Robin Hood for our Middle Ages history.  We all love it.  Big Girl read another version of it by Howard Pyle for literature, as well as a couple other smaller versions we have here.  She really likes comparing.  We also watched the old Erol Flynn Robin Hood on Netflix.  It was fun.

The paragraph writing book that Little Girl was doing was quickly getting very complicated, which makes sense since the cover says it is for up to grade 8.  So I have dropped that for now.  Not sure if I will resume some sort of writing exercise for her or not.  I said earlier that I didn't think she needed it, but I am not sure.  If I do, it will definitely be Beechick inspired, like copywork and dictation, along with writing things in a different tense, or from another point of view.  Nothing too complicated.  

I started Spell to Write and Read with Big Girl.  We haven't actually started the spelling lists yet, but she already knows most of the phonograms from when we did it before a long time ago. We did some pages in the log, and will finish those next week.  Then the following week, we will be ready to start the word lists.

We started our chronological reading through Acts, inserting letters where they fit into Acts, this week.  

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

We took last week off, except for our read alouds, because so much has been going on.  We did start a couple new books for American History.  We are reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie, and I am reading a book called Toby Tyler, about a boy who runs away and joins the circus, to Little Girl.  Big Girl has read it before.  

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

It's been very busy around here, so I am late getting this up.  But better late than never.  Our new artist is American artist, Norman Rockwell.  We really enjoy looking at his work.  Our composer is Igor Stravinsky.  As with most of the moderns, we just do not really care for him.  I'll be glad when we start back at the beginning again with the old ones like Bach and Beethoven.  The girls will too.  But we have a few more moderns to cover first, for exposure if nothing else.  

We are still working on memorizing The Spider and the Fly.  It is the longest we have done yet.  We will finish in another week or so.

For middle ages history, we started reading The Magna Charta.  

Our current country for geography is Wales.  Not a whole lot to study there, and the library didn't have any books on it.

Little Girl did her usual lessons in everything else this week, as did Big Girl.  Big Girl has decided she needs more teaching on punctuation than what is given in her Easy Grammar book. So, after she finishes it up, which will be soon, I think I will order her Jensen's Punctuation.  It looks very good, with plenty of practice.  She has also decided that she would like to do some spelling work.  We think she needs to learn the spelling rules and practice them so she can apply them to unfamiliar words.  So I am going to start Spell to Write and Read with her.  We will just start farther in the book than you do with a younger student.  Little Girl did it for about a year, and I can see her still applying what she learned.  She is more of a natural speller than her sister though.  I think the start in public school with their whole-word approach to reading and their "invented spelling" ruined Big Girl.

Big Girl should be finishing up Ivanhoe this week, then we will watch the movie.  One of the older versions, of course.

=========================

WEEKLY REVIEW

Nothing new with our fine arts this week.  We will be changing composer and artist next week.

For American history, we have been reading about the start of cities, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.  For Middle Ages, we read some spine books about Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland.  

Big Girl started Ivanhoe for literature this week.  She really likes it, and I am supposed to be reading it with her, but it puts me to sleep!  I might just read some Cliff's notes or something.  She also started her Lial's math.  So far, so good.  Just basic review at this point.  Her writing was about using adverbs and prepositional phrases.

Little Girl did all her usual lessons.  Her writing was about outlining paragraphs and using parallel construction.  She is actually doing better than I expected!  I am pleased.

=========================