Tot School Report

Angel is 37 months old

Weekly Report: Creation to Greeks

We have finished Week 8 in My Father's World Creation to Greeks and it keeps getting better. We are really enjoying this year and have been learning so much. Here's a brief overview of our week:

Grammar: In Winston Grammar, we reviewed nouns, articles, pronouns, verbs and began helping verbs. In Rod and Staff English, we learned about sentences and simple predicates.

Writing: In My Father's World, we notebooked our History lesson and we also completed the ending to the story, The Unexpected Guest, in Story Starters. I may allow my gang to share their creative endings. They really enjoy Story Starters.

Spelling: In Simply Spelling, we completed lesson 2 and learned about words with "ce" have the s sound, "ei" have the long e sound, "ture" have the the "chure" sound, and words with the spelling of "ore" sound like "or".
Music: We are continuing our study of the baroque composer, Vivaldi, in My Father's World. We listened to his Four Seasons: Autumn and painted our rendition of Autumn using watercolors. We also learned about Egyptian art and how Egyptians had drawn figures in their artwork then tried to replicate this.
Vocabulary: We don't use a formal foreign language study curriculum this year since we are studying Greek words in My Father's World. Adding a formal program was just too time consuming for us so we will pick up Latin again with our study of Rome in the upcoming year. My Father's World uses English from the Roots Up and our word for the week was "philia" which means love and friendship. We created our cards listing the derivative and vocabulary then created sentences with the vocabulary words before we had our quiz.
Bible and History: Our Bible and History are combined in My Father's World and we memorized Exodus 20:7. We are memorizing the Ten Commandments verse by verse each week as we learn about Abraham and his descendants. We notebooked a summary of Abraham and Isaac. We also learned about Jacob and Esau then we watched the movie, Jacob, from Netflix. We skipped making Lentil soup recipe and made my Chicken and Wild Rice soup instead. My gang just wasn't enthusiastic about the Lentil soup idea. LOL!
We also learned about Egyptian tomb painting.
We added a page of our colored Tomb Painting provided in My Father's World to our history notebook.Then we created our version of ancient tomb paintings with some plaster of paris. We scrubbed the final peace with a scouring pad to get that ancient look. It's hard to see the details in the pic but they did a great job.
Science: We are on the subject of Air and Water in My Father's World. We learned about how air has mass, molecules and we learned about air pressure. We did an experiment using straws. One had holes and the other did not. The goal was to race to see who can drink the fastest. It was so fun to watch. My oldest twin, on the left, has such a time attempting to drink using the holed straw.
Another experiment which demonstrated this lesson was an experiment trapping water and air inside a cup.
Math: In Teaching Textbooks, we learned about adding and subtracting large numbers, and rounding/estimating.

We had karate lessons, football, guitar lessons, and piano Lessons this week also. My gang skipped co-op (music theory and drama) which is soon coming to a close. I must admit that it was nice having one less event to attend. We have decided not to sign up for co-op in the spring due to our already full schedule.

Thanks for reading about our week and be sure to read more by clicking on the graphic above.

Have a victorious week in our Father's world!

New Site

I'm so proud of my friend, Mary Jo. She is a writer, editor and a mom who has been homeschooling her four children for 12 years and as a single parent for 8 of those years. She is such an encourager to me and has recently started her own site. I think it will be a tremendous blessing to single parent homeschoolers. Check it out here.

Tot School Report

"Angel" is 37 months old
I had a fun week with my new Kumon books...tracingcoloring...
cutting...
counting and connecting dots 1 to 5...
and applying stickers.
I also watched Letter Factory, Sesame Street Count with Me and Your Baby Can Read videos.
I had more fun with some star stickers that I picked out at the store.
and playing with my number puzzle...
and having some motor skill fun with a balloon....

and a fun time playing Candy Land with my brothers except they ignored my instructions...
enjoyed my favorite activity, painting....
Look how big I am!
Thanks for reading my report. Have a blessed weekend!

For more Tot School Reports, just click the graphic above.

Weekly Report:: Creation to Greeks

Spelling: We completed our first lesson in Simply Spelling and I really love this curriculum. It has everything that I've been looking for in a Charlotte Mason spelling curriculum. My gang copied a poem for four days and completed a simple activity that applied spelling rules to certain words in the poem. We used colored pencils to underline the words of focus on each day.

Writing: We learned how to develop a main idea and write detailed sentences by viewing a picture in Spectrum Writing.
Grammar: We took a quiz on common and proper nouns, verbs, pronouns and articles in Winston Grammar. We are returning to Rod and Staff English next week and supplementing our grammar with Winston Grammar. We will continue to supplement our writing with Story Starters and save Spectrum Writing for our summer brush up. You can read some brief info about our return here.

Bible/History: In My Father's World Bible/History, we continued our study of God's covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael and the destruction of Sodom. Our Bible memory verse was Exodus 20:4. We are memorizing the Ten Commandments verse by verse each week. We viewed the movie, Ten Commandments, also. It was an interesting bonus clip at the end of the movie regarding how only a few percentage of people in the world actually know all of the Ten Commandments but can list all the major sports teams and can even list the ingredients on a Big Mac hamburger....interesting. We added Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac to our timeline.
We also learned about how Egyptians created papyrus paper and notebooked our coloring sheets from My Father's World. We also learned about the Phoenicians "purple men" and life within those civilizations.
We also learned about Hieroglyphics and created cartouches with our names in Hieroglyphic symbols.
Science: In My Father's World, we learned through some experiments how air takes up space. We completed two cup experiments demonstrating this. One experiment caused for us to place paper in the bottom of the cup then submerge it into water. After removing the cup, we noticed how the paper remained dry due to the air inside the container once submerged. The other experiment required us to pour air from one cup to the other while the cups remained submerged under water. It was neat to watch this.
We also learned how air has mass. This experiment called for us to create a make-shift scale using straws and a pin. We tapes two balloons to both ends then blew one up. The balloon filled with air obviously weighed more so it tilted our scale.
Music and Art: In My Father's World, we listened to Vivaldi's "Summer" while we used watercolors to paint our renditions of summer.
Vocabulary: In My Father's World, our Greek word of the week was tropos which means turning. We created our usual cards listing the derivative and vocabulary on the back then we created sentences, defined vocab, and reviewed before our quiz.

We are still reading Tanglewood Secrets and our book basket is filled with the recommended Egypt related books listed in the appendix of My Father's World.

Logic: The gang completed a Mind Benders activity. It's so odd how they didn't care for these last year but now they love them. Maybe it's because I don't ask them to complete the activities now. (Reverse Psychology). ;-)

Math: My gang is in love with Teaching Textbooks Math. They want to complete math as the first subject of the day. This week, my 6th graders completed their first quiz which they scored very well. I'm proud of their efforts. They also completed lessons about Long Addition and Carrying of Large Numbers. My youngest son completed lessons about numbers with the Millions Place Value and Greater Than, Less Than. My youngest twin, Sweet Potato, wanted to give a review of Teaching Textbooks from a student's perspective. The computer screen displayed very weirdly on camera so please ignore the "broken tv" rolling effect. :-)



Please feel free to read about the weeks of other MFW users by clicking the graphic.

Have a victorious week in our Father's World!

Please Go Back To Start

Sometimes trying new things only makes you realize just how much you really miss the old things. Don't say I told you so. LOL! Lately, I have been feeling a strong sense to return to Rod and Staff English while we complete Winston Basic Grammar this year and my children are not too ecstatic about it but they know Mom has to do what's in their best interest. Winston Grammar's lessons only take about 10 minutes a day and 2-3x/week to complete. After two months of using the Basic set, Winston appears to be more of a fantastic hands-on supplement to grammar than a full program, IMO. I'm not stating that it's incomplete because it REALLY does work and the cards reinforce the rules very well which is what we were missing with Rod and Staff...reinforcement of the concepts for retaining. Mad Libs were not really successful in doing this last year. However, I miss the comprehensiveness of Rod and Staff English. I love having capitalization, punctuation and formal writing included within our grammar which is missing in Winston. My children love Winston and it's definitely working so we are certainly keeping it as a supplement. Winston Grammar and Rod and Staff English are among Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Curriculum Picks so I don't think we can go wrong by utilizing both programs. :-)

So our new Language Arts schedule consists of:

Rod and Staff English (grammar and writing) 4x week
Winston Basic (our grammar supplement) 3x/week for 10 minutes
Story Starters (our creative writing supplement) 1x/week.
Simply Spelling (our spelling program) 4x/week


By the way, if you ever need any schedules for Rod and Staff English, you can download them here.