Less Traveled By ~ Homeschool Edition

What We've Been Up To

I don't know how the days and weeks pass so quickly, but they do!

We have been enjoying much of our new year and will be entering phase two soon!  We'll be adding in a few more subjects on a regular basis and also ending our summer co-op.

So what have we been up to?

We've met during the summer with some other families, and it has been a nice!  We have completed nature study, drawing lessons, picture study. poetry reading and narration practice together.  We studied works of Henri Matisse and used Drawing with Children for art lessons.

Here is one of JB's drawings and watercolor inspired by the drawing lesson too:

Some other things to note:

JB has completed her first nine chapters of math.  She is doing GREAT!  We are using Math U See Beta right now and anticipate starting Delta this year.  We'll see  She is also working some from Math Mammoth (time, money, fractions, geometry) and completing Daily Math too.  (Last year we used Evan Moor's Daily Math, this year, so far, I've been making problems for review.)

She also completed her first current events report page.  I thought we'd use God's World News this year to practice writing short current events reports based on the articles.  I got the idea when thinking about how Ambleside Online incorporates current events reading for the older students.  She enjoyed writing her first two reports.

We've been reading from various books including Meet Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, Understood Betsy, One Small Square:  Arctic Tundra, A Child's History of the World and Grandpa's Box.  JB is currently reading Treasure Island on her own and she is REALLY enjoying it!  (It's so exciting to listen to her talk about enjoying books.)

That's just a small sampling of what we've been up to!  Stay tuned for more....  :-)

Children's Book Week is Moving to May!

I am so excited that Children's Book Week has moved to the spring!  It used to be held in the fall right before Thanksgiving, and that is a somewhat hard time of year to plan an event in our homeschool group because it is just so busy!  However, as soon as this year's theme is announced, I'll be putting on my thinking cap  :-) and coming up with some sort of celebration of reading, books and learning for our small group to participate in if they'd like to.

I used to enjoy this week so much as a classroom teacher because it was a time to be silly together and enjoy books even more so than on a regular day.  We always invited guest readers into our classroom and got permission for special dress up days....."Hats Off to Reading" was especially a treat, because the children got to wear hats to school that day!  We also had days like "Get Mixed Up in a Good Book" and we all wore mismatched, inside out clothing.  We had a nice celebration in our homeschool group a few years ago, but I have not been able to coordinate once sice.

Anyway, I'm mentioning this now, because this year the Children's Book Council is also beginning a new tradition of a national child selected book awards program and this year's choices will be posted in March.  I'll make a note of when I notice that the selections and/or theme is posted for this year; but just in case you want to check on your own, here's the link.  I think I may also start thinking of an author study to do in May.  FUN!