Half-baked Homeschool

BIBLE
Our morning Bible time is working well, now that we've moved our devotion to dinnertime. We practice reciting our memory verses and character traits and then read some related Bible passages. I'm finding that it's better to do just a little bit everyday, rather than skip it completely because time is too short to finish everything.

The one thing I would like to include, though, is prayer at the end. As we wrap up Bible and breakfast together, everything has been a little chaotic, and we (I) frequently let myself get carried to the next thing without stopping to pray.

We are all still enjoying our evening devotion time using Long Story Short. The short passages and simple but thoughtful questions have really stirred some great discussions around the dinner table.

HISTORY
Bearclaw's class covered India, Afghanistan and Africa in the late 19th century over the last two weeks. The section on Africa focused on David Livingstone's work, about which I was fairly ignorant (save all but the Stanley quote).

Shortbread began his study of ancient Egypt with looking at the significance of the Nile river to that culture. I'm sure he's having a bit a deja vu , as I know he remembers quite a bit from when Bearclaw studied the ancient period.

LITERATURE
While Bearclaw finds Abraham Lincoln an interesting study, he is not thrilled with reading a biography. He's slightly more excited about this one than the Paul Revere biography that they read last year, but he's still rather read historical fiction or fantasy.

Shortbread is enjoying The Real Story of Creation, which accompanies the first weeks of digging into the ancient time period in history. The illustrations are lovely, and it covers the creation story from Genesis in a way that could work with almost any Christian viewpoint.

LANGUAGE ARTS
If review is helpful in grammar, then Bearclaw should be gaining a lot right now, since his class has been in review mode for all of these first weeks.

Spelling presents the opposite situation, since the class has skipped from Spelling Workout C to Spelling Workout E. It's been challenging!

Shortbread has also been reviewing, using Saxon Phonics. So far, it's not my favorite, but then, I didn't do a great job of giving Bearclaw a solid foundation in phonics, so I'll wait and see.


MATH
More of the same: review. But next week, Bearclaw starts measurement (length, weight, etc).

SCIENCE
We're continuing to use The Handbook of Nature Study blog (by Barb) for our nature study. Last week, we took a trip to a local park for some hiking/walking and found some items of interest to log as the first entries in our nature journals.

I was pleased with both boys willingness to take a break from their digging, wandering, wading, etc. to focus on sketching. Bradley focused on acorns (which he needs find "further evidence" about). Shortbread zeroed in on the Common Pawpaw tree, which has huge leaves and looks as if it belongs in a prehistoric tropical forest somewhere.



I'm so far behind on Wrap-ups (crud, it's only September), that I can't even link to the other Wrap-Ups.