Introducing the World

We have been working hard at school. I just haven’t been recording it well. In fact, we’re doing an extra day of school each week to enable us to finish up a week early.

They’ve been enjoying learning about Rome very much. Gladiator contests range through the living room and yard. They watched *City* by David Macaulay twice. It was darker than I expected, but even the twins wanted to rewatch it.

The book of Greek myths is still the all-time favorite, though.

I’m thinking about buying a few months of Dreambox over the summer. I’m pretty impressed with the math instruction and it’s fun for the kids. I’ve been letting them have daily computer time as a way to regulate school time. It works. I still feel a little guilty about it. But it’s only 15 minutes apiece.

I finally bought Startwrite–the older, cheaper version. I’m letting Deux trace, as he still has a few letters where he is in doubt about where to start. I feel like we’ve slacked a little in the care we take with handwriting, alas.

We’ve had some beautiful days and lots of playing outside. The big kids are learning to mow (with a non-powered mower). We went to some beaches and some trails.

Dot has learned to write her own name–with some letters upside down.

We haven’t done any fun read-alouds for the big kids. Should probably start something up again, but it may wait for summer.

The past two weeks have been busy with grandparent visits, but we still did our planned school readings while the twins did special projects; then the big kids did special projects during nap time. It worked great. The grandparents also read The Secret Garden to them.

Our readings about Rome and Carthage have really fascinated Deux and he even drew his own map one day. Duchess is eagerly waiting for the chapter on Roman lifestyle and the accompanying paper dolls. She has checked out some huge books of historical costumes and has spent hours poring over them.

The accompanying lesson on Roman numerals and the number systems of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews also were a lot of fun. (We read a chapter from Number Stories of Long Ago.) They were so interested they want to memorize the Greek alphabet and I expanded on the idea by showing scientific notation and briefly explaining exponents.

The twins’ special projects were painting t-shirts. Duchess made potholders on a loom. Deux built a paper castle. They all had a wonderful time, and now I can stop feeling guilty about handcrafts for a month or two.

I realized this morning that Dash has somehow taught himself to read numerals. I have no idea how he figured this out. He is very good at counting objects up to ten or so and keeps trying to work out addition problems.

Year 1: CHOW, Ch. 29 “A Boy King”; PFN, “Law of the Wood”; PTTS Ch. 19 “Forest Fire”; JSS, “The Alphabet”; Aesop, “Fox and Goat”; “Cat, Cock and Mouse.” Science–Biomes of the world;

Twins: Letter “M”; Readywriter “Brownies” page; pattern blocks; read-alouds.

We switched back to morning school, which means I’ve been doing a better job of doing things with the twins and the big kids have been reading out loud to me more regularly. The twins remembered more letters than I would have thought and they are at least moderately interested in the Readywriter pages.

We had a really great discussion on wildfires; we supplemented with a more detailed picture book and also they recalled a great deal from the relevant chapter in Little House on the Prairie, so we re-read and discussed it. Then we did our science lesson on different biomes and located pictures of wildlife and identified where it would live and why.

Alexander the Great was a pretty fun topic, too, and Duchess at least had read some of the supplemental books I got.

We have slowed down in math as it gets a little more complex and so that we’ll come out even at the end of the year. In addition, they are now doing a computer math game every morning while I finish up the morning chores and do things with the twins. Zoo Whiz has been one. It’s basically just glorified worksheets, but they’re relatively intelligent worksheets and they have enjoyed earning animals for their zoo. Duchess also has been enjoying the beta test of the Addition and Subtraction Timez Attack, but Deux finds the timed work too stressful.

The next two weeks Grandma and Grandpa are visiting, but we’re hoping to continue more or less on track, with the twins spending school time doing special projects with Grandma and Grandpa, and then big kids taking their turn in the afternoon.

We are now midway through Week 23, trying to finish up the term next week so we can take Holy Week off. We’ve had some nice weather and some bad weather and a really horrible stomach flu, all of which have driven us partly off course, but we’ve managed to pick up and move forward.

I don’t have any inspiring or creative stories, though. We just read and narrated. We are horribly behind on picture study and music.

We had a good time reading The Librarian Who Measured the Earth (about Eratosthenes) and later doing a Sieve of Eratosthenes to identify prime numbers. Our history reading has been about the Golden Age of Greece.

We’ve started planting in the garden and talked some about plant structures and purposes.

We went on a creek hike.

We went to the Children’s Museum in Tacoma.

We played a lot of Plants vs. Zombies when everyone was sick. They learned what “vs.” means. Actually I think learning to deal with some of the pressure of losing or facing threats and realizing it’s just a game is good for them. Some of them take it pretty intensely.

They’re listening to Chronicles of Narnia on CD at night and Duchess and Deux are both working on the books for themselves.

We wound up taking time off after President’s Day, owing to a combination of surprise trip for the grownups, surprise midnight ER trip for Dash, followed by exhaustion and then a cleaning frenzy. Fortunately we’d caught up beforehand, so we are still only out a week and should finish the term by the end of March.

So collectively, we have done:

Year 1: CHOW, Ch. 22 (Rome Kicks Out Kings), Ch. 23 (Greece v. Persia), Ch. 24 (Fighting Mad); BBB, Sparrows, Bluebird, Robin; PTTS, Ch. 14-15; D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, Hera, Hephaestus, Aphrodite; JSS, Armadillos; Nesbit’s Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale”; 50 Famous Tales, “Sword of Damocles,” “Damon and Pythias”; BFSU, Kinetic and Potential Energy; D’Aulaire’s Abraham Lincoln.

We’ve been really enjoying the history. Rather than doing the narrating in turns, they have enjoyed drawing illustrations/diagrams of the history story and then telling about it. We are all eager to find out what happens once the great Persian army finally reaches Greece.

I haven’t done most of the 50 Famous Tales but I’m trying to put in a few that go with what we are reading. They are nice quick reads and good stories.

I was a little nervous about doing Winter’s Tale since this is the first Shakespeare we have done without a picture book, but we took it in a couple of chunks and illustrated it with Lego figures and it was great. It’s very fairy-tale like in its structure, too, which helped.

Abraham Lincoln was a last-minute emergency substitution when I realized our library doesn’t have Buffalo Bill. (It’s a free read in a later year.) They really loved it, and since Lincoln is a hero of DOB’s, I thought it good to spend the extra time on him.

I did finally get the picture switched out, but we are behind on picture study and haven’t been doing music at all. And poetry has been spotty (though we’ve read the poems before, so it’s not THAT critical).

They’ve been watching Spanish videos lately; they thought they had finished Salsa, then discovered a whole new row of episodes they haven’t seen. They also enjoy watching segments from Los Pimpollos, a Peruvian children’s program, on YouTube.

We did a high-energy lesson on potential and kinetic energy at the playground one morning.

We had some very cruddy weather (mid-30s and raining/snowing) for awhile, so we have not been out much. We could, but we didn’t.

The time spent organizing the kids’ room and living room has paid off–we are doing much better at keeping it picked up, so that on housecleaning day I could get right into cleaning instead of picking up for two hours first.

I have been having Deux try to do copywork from a printed sheet onto a separate sheet of ordinary lined paper. It was a real challenge for him to figure out where to start, and he kept getting distracted. He would prefer to just trace, but I decided instead to print out some first-grade lined paper (with dashes and space below the line for descenders) and write out the words for him to copy directly above. This has proven to be a more accessible task, while still challenging him.

Math is still going well. They have addition facts pretty much down and are doing well with the transition to two-digit addition and subtraction. Multiplication facts are taking a bigger role as the numbers we study get bigger, and those are definitely much rougher. I want to spend more time just playing around with the quantities. I also wrote the more difficult ones we’ve already studied on the board for them to see often. I’d like to play some games to drill, but I don’t know any game that organizes multiplication facts by size of product rather than by fact family.

The twins have been listening to stories: Beatrix Potter, Robert McCloskey, Narnia and Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest series (with the big kids, on CD). And playing.