Homeschooling Week in Review

Every school morning, the kids get up and get going to the music of their morning routine tape, which this year is a cd. I finally figured out James showed me how to record sound clips on the computer and how to burn a cd. It took some time to put together the cd with instructions and music, but the end product is totally worth it. It puts the older kids on automatic pilot so that I can get myself and Logan ready. The cd talks the kids through getting ready, breakfast and clean up, wiping down the bathrooms, and devotions. When the cd is done, it is time for school.

In the morning, the children work on memory work, Latin, math, grammar, and piano practice. After lunch, we work on spelling and memory work together then work on writing (copy work or dictation presently), then history or science and reading.

Here are some highlights from our week:

In the past several weeks, Evan, Matthew and Sophie have all memorized the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. (If anyone knows how to pronounce "Bysshe" feel free to let me know! :) The kids memorize easily, but it is like pulling teeth to get any dramatic recitation out of them. I did get a video of Matthew reciting. (Click on "video" to see it. I chose not to embed it so that my blog would load faster.) The children are also memorizing the first chapter of Philippians.

For history, we read this week in Story of the World about the Old Kingdom of Egypt, mummies and pyramids. The kids read independently from these library books:

Click on the picture to enlarge.

Sophie and Matthew wrote a rough draft narration about mummies. Sophie did an oral narration on pyramids, which I wrote down for her to copy, while Matthew wrote his own.

I used Evan-Moor's History Pockets: Ancient Egypt to make pyramid shape books. Using a copier, I changed the title on the template and whited out the pre-printed information. Sophie copied her narration on lined paper that I put in the pyramid booklet, labeled the "map" of the interior of the pyramid (back cover), and glued in the step-by-step building pictures included in the History Pockets book.








Because Matthew still struggles with handwriting and he is still learning typing, I typed his handwritten narration including all of his mistakes. He edited the typed copy which went into the shape booklet.

The mummy rough draft will have to wait until later to get put into a booklet. I'm tentatively planning on taking some time around Christmas to have the kids finish their booklets on Ancient Egypt and putting them into a lap book. We'll see how that pans out! Evan did not make a shape booklet, because I've been teaching him how to outline (from the book Early Times: The Story of Ancient Egypt by Suzanne Art Strauss) and there is only so much time to spend on history!

Matthew and Sophie are doing science together while Evan is using Apologia's General Science book. He composed and polished two paragraphs answering some thinking questions this week and enjoyed doing an experiment which he partially videotaped. He started the lab report on the experiment, but will finish it next week.