Week of 9-9-13 School

What a wonderful week this week has been.  Now as you may have guessed since there was not a post last week we decided to take the entire week off from school, sleep in and just relax. Why? Well, this week was a big bang into the school year. Not only did we start school with all our curriculum choices this year, but I also started teaching both children’s choir again as well as started singing in my adult choir, the children have their piano lessons and I am leading worship for the children’s Sunday school classes. Whew! What a busy week. In a couple weeks we will be starting our Art class once again too. To go from such a slow and relaxed summer to BANG! Well despite the 0 to 100 MPH in 5 seconds flat we had a great week. Ok so where to start?

Let’s start off with our Bible curriculum. As I wrote in a few posts earlier I decided to do something very different this year. I picked up Apologia’s book on “Who is God and How Can I really Know Him”. Now I have to admit, when I saw the book and read through it I was on the fence as to whether or not this book would be too heavy for my 8 year old, but I figured I would get the coloring companion book and if she picked up a few things that would be great. But OMGosh! She is actually enjoying it. The book is, so far, fantastic. This week we have been talking about the foundation, which is God’s word, and how to build upon the Rock and of course the things not to build upon sinking sand. I have had them do a ton of copy work and both of them have been really enjoying it. But the best part is they both feel like they already knew some of this information. Ok, so I have to give myself a pat on the back for that. I guess all these years of just reading through the Bible and explaining how to apply it in real life has paid off. I have been doing apologetics all along. LOL.

For English we are using Rod and Staff once again. This is my daughters first year in English. We did a little at the very end of last year about Nouns so we are working on Verbs right now. I do not have them keep and English notebook instead what we use is a white board when we practice or English Grammar. This year I thought I would take pictures of it. Just to prove to anyone who asks that we are really doing our English.

My son forgot so much from last years English that I decided to go ahead and go back several lesson and do a review. So as you can see we are reviewing how to pick out a noun, pronoun, proper noun, verbs etc from a sentence as well as the difference between a past and present verbs.

Geography is great so far. We are using “Trail Guide to World Geography”. They each have their own atlas and are learning how to use it this week.  So the way this curriculum works is each day we take about 5 minutes and answer 1 to 2 questions in which they have to use their atlas to find the answer. This week I was more or less looking up the answers with them to help the kiddos learn how to use the atlas. And of course this week and the next couple weeks we will be just skimming over the World to get a general idea. In the following weeks we will focus on each continent. Each child has a geography notebnook and it is sectioned into each of the continents with maps as well as a Map fill in the black. I am looking forward to using this curriculum. I think I will learn just as much as they will from this.

YEA! History! We have so much fun with our Story of the World History and Student pages. This week we are just getting out of the Roman Empire and into the Byzantine Empire. Learning about Emperor Justinian1 and his wife Theodora. You can see we had a couple of coloring pages of the beautiful cathedrals they had in Constantinople. But the craft project was FUN! We did mosaics just like they had in the beautiful churches in that time period. My daughter decided to make a green bird (just like our little birdie, Crackers) and my son chose a Lego. Now the pictures I have here are not the completed projects. I have since grouted them in black and we will hang them in frames on colored paper and then in frames as gifts for Christmas. The Lego mosaic will be for my son’s best friend for Christmas and the bird is for my Mother-in-law. Geeze, I hope they don’t read this. Well if you do, forget you read that!

Lastly in science we are going to be reading from Apologia’s “Exploring Land Animals on the Sixth Day”. This will be great fun. So far the first few pages we read was an overview and basically learning that zoology is the study of animal behavior, habitat and anatomy. So not too much to write on that right now, but in the coming weeks I am sure there will be more than enough.

Anyway, I hope you week in school was great, I know ours was. And we will catch you all next week. Have a great weekend!