Half-baked Homeschool

This is the first time I've logged onto blogger in over 3 months. When I know I'm behind on something, I tend to avoid it, which is not very helpful in terms of getting un-behind.

When I last posted, I was already doing a poor job of posting timely wrap-ups, but since my main goal in maintaining this blog was to log our homeschooling progress, I wanted to keep going...and then May hit.

I don't know if it's a good thing or not, but I've pretty much forgotten everything from the last six weeks of school about which I intended to post an update. Still, in order to avoid huge loose ends flapping wildly in the wind, I will provide a brief synopsis of (what I can remember from) those last weeks of school. :

BIBLE:
In May we focused on encouragement. Sort of. Looking back, something tells me I was probably less than really focused on it, since I'm sure I spent most of May rushing us from one event to another. I tend to "encouarage" cooperation in those times with the volume of my voice. See who needs a morning Bible revamp?

HISTORY
We finished up SOTW Volume 3, minus a few chapters. We covered such topics Mexico and the movement west in America, which includes discussions of the Alamo, the Oregon Trail and the California Gold Rush. Bearclaw enjoyed the novel, Moccasin Trail, which he finished just recently. As a family, we read The Boy in the Alamo, which we would all recommend, especially for boys. Perhaps the title makes that obvious.

LITERATURE
Bearclaw finished reading Seaman's Journal: On the Trail with Lewis and Clark as well as completing his final project for the book. The project entailed constructing a fictional dialogue between an interviewer and both Lewis and Clark. It made for a fun and relatively easy assignment, since the students were permitted to dictate their imagined dialogue to an adult, who would then type it. Any guesses as to who did most of the work on this one?

Shortbread and I really slacked off with our reading in May, which makes me sad, because it makes for such wonderful memories. I hope the busier first-grade schedule won't exclude time for reading aloud non-curriculum related books.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Bearclaw finished up his final essay. He wrote a persuasive essay about reading as "the best pasttime". I was certainly persuaded.

Shortbread covered the rest of the "Letterbooks" for Kindergarten. I think I'm even happier than he is about that.

MATH
We did not finish Primary Mathematics 3A by the end of the year. (In fact, as of today, we're only about 3/4ths of the way through.) The remainder of the book covers those multiplication facts we have yet to learn.

Shortbread is almost finished with his kindergarten math book...time to order Primary Mathematics 1A

SCIENCE
We finished our science curriculum around week 27, so we're done with "official" science until fall. Of course, we're always involved with random nature study.

So that's it. No photos. No link to other Wrap-ups. Just a few final notes to tie up those ends before we move on.

Since my husband is at home looking for a job most of the time now, I do not have as much time on the computer as I used to. (We only have one. If he gets a job, we can get another, but then we won't need it. Oh, the irony.) While it's worth it to enjoy his presence at home, the competition for computer time is definitely reflected in this Wrap-Up.

We studied the French and Indian War, and so continued with our studies of Native Americans. This included making popcorn with maple syrup poured on top, as the Huron Indians did, and making shields.

Maple Popcorn Recipe:
12 cups popped/salted popcorn
2 c. real maple syrup
1/2 c. butter
1/2 tsp. baking soda

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Heat the syrup and butter in a saucepan at medium heat until boiling. Continue boiling/stirring until a the syrup reached 236 degrees on a candy thermometer. Remove from heat and stir in baking soda. Pour syrup over popcorn and stir to coat (I like to use two bowl so I have room to stir). Spread/arrange/dump popcorn onto parchment lined baking sheets and bake for another 10-15 minutes in oven. Cool and eat!

As images of quiet waiting drift through my head, frequently accompanied by flashes of silent snow falling, I realize (once again) that my image will not match my reality. The snow part should be my first clue - we're in Georgia. The boys apparently do not entertain thoughts of stillness, and neither do the coordinators of their various activities. So we will wait with somewhat noisy excitement instead.

Part of that excitement is fed by the presence of my husband's parents, who arrive every year on during the first week of December to spend Christmas with us. They live in upstate New York, so we only see them a couple of times a year - I don't blame the children for being excited about that. We just love having them here.

I finally broke down and bought a new advent wreath this year. In years past, I've thrown together a homemade version using a window wreath, a plate, and some candles. I am not crafty and the wreath was evidence. Mercifully, it caught on fire during last year's Christmas Eve party. I'll be using long-burning candles with the new one. The children love to eat by it's light each night while we read an advent book that I've seen on homeschool recommendation lists for years: Jotham's Journey.

The book offers a reading for each night of Advent, and then a Scripture reading and summary that tie the chapter into some greater spiritual truth. It's quite an exciting story and might even be too intense for some little ones, but the boys are loving it and begging for one more chapter each night. (But then we'd be off schedule, we explain...)

In between the visiting, Advent observing, decorating, baking, birthday partying, choir practicing, etc., we have had to make time for school. This may be a greater struggle for me than for the boys, but we're managing.

The past week's unit in Biblioplan covered Persia and the Ottoman Turks. Because we're studying the "early modern" period this year, which covers early American history, Biblioplan includes the study of important individuals in American history in the units focusing on the history of other countries. This week we talked about Daniel Boone, and Bearclaw is enjoying Daniel Boone, Boy Hunter.

He also completed the novel A Lion To Guard Us by Clyde Robert Bulla for his literature class. As a follow-up assignment, the student's were to make a time capsule representing one of the main characters in the book. Bearclaw chose Jemmy and turned in his project on Wednesday.

Speaking of reading, Shortbread read his first early-reader book!! He was so happy with himself, and I'm really looking forward to all of the wonderful books he's going to be able to enjoy reading soon.

In his kindergarten class, they focus mainly on language skills, and he's doing very well. If anything he's a little bored (or maybe I am), because some of the activities we're asked to do at home seem unessesary. Still, because he's picking up reading without any tears or arguments, I'm keeping an open mind about the effectiveness of some of the lessons.

Bearclaw's language skills are improving, and he's mastered quite a number of grammar concepts. His spelling grade is excellent, but I'm working to get him to be more careful when doing his work, so that the progress he's made in spelling will be reflected in his writing. As for vocabulary - he's doing well, but the jury is still out on Wordly Wise for me.

With all of the focus we're putting on humanities, in order to complete the assignments from our hybrid school, I've neglected math somewhat. Bearclaw is actually moving along in his Sinapore workbook (he's working on fractions), but he's forgotten some of his mutiplication tables, so I need to do a better job with daily drills. I'm hardly working on math at all with Shortbread. It's not him; it's me - I think I'm tired of the curriculum and how it's structured. It may be time to move from Shiller to Singapore for him.

Our two-family science co-op hasn't met lately, becasue of all of the holiday activities, but we plan to finish up the physics book from Real Science 4 Kids soon, and then after Christmas it's chemsitry! (All four boys in the group have images of explosions, I just know it...)

As I've been typing this over several days, we've gotten quite few snow flurries. Maybe my images of Advent were'nt so far-fetched after all...

We've been a little loose with our schedule this past week, mostly due to other activities and the impending Thanksgiving/Christmas preparations. Also, the weather has been lovely most of the time, and I want the boys to enjoy what may be the last of the really mild temps for the year.

Truth be told, this is the time of year when I would typically start to slow our school schedule down, and I'm missing that freedom. Since we started the hybrid school for humanities, I have had to come to grips with working according to someone else's schedule; it's been my greatest challenge this year. We are likely, however, to accomplish more this holiday season in school than we ever have before.

We are closing in on our first 12(!) weeks with Biblioplan, and we'll soon move on to the 18th century. The topics for this week (week 11) were "Indians, Canada, and Pennsylvania". This included a study of the conflicts between Native American tribes and the colonies of New England and New France. In our look at Pennsylvania, we me both William Penn and Benjamin Franklin. We especially enjoyed reading a biography about each of these men: William Penn:Founder of Pennsylvania by Steven Kroll and D'Aulaire's Benjamin Franklin.

In a case of perfect timing, one of our local state parks hosted a Native American Pow-wow last weekend, and we were planning to be at the park for an early birthday celebration for Bearclaw anyway. After the birthday ropes course was completed, we headed over to the pow-wow for an opportunistic field trip.

Here's Bearclaw tackling one of the course challenges:

And Shortbread tackling his own "little guy" ropes course:

We were able to see aspects of Native American life from both western and eastern nations recreated at the pow-wow. We saw encampments, cooking demonstations, weapons, fire making, tanning, and dancing to traditional music/drums.

Here are some glimpses:

Most of Bearclaw's efforts outside of history this week were concentrated on writing narrative paragraphs. His teacher assigned the topic "The Worst Party I Ever Attended", and Bearclaw's little story made me chuckle, especially the part about a pinata full of Barbies for a boy party. The horror! Clearly, he's getting his ideas for fiction straight out of his nightmares.

Shortbread had two weeks to work on his assigments from last week, so we were in the middle of letter "Tt" this past week. We actually had a tough time coming up with books for "T", and almost everyone Shortbread spotted was in the word "the" - which didn't count. We did get to read one of our favorites, though: Bear About Town.

Did you ever start something, fall behind, and then resist picking it up again because you were so far behind that the thought of catching up overwhelmed you? So it is with the blog for me. I also had this ridiculous idea that I would blog after all of my other work was finished. You know, instead of sitting around twiddling my thumbs as I usually do.

One of the purposes of this blog is to log our homeschooling activities and accomplishments. In the six weeks since I last posted we've been working our way through the humanities curricula for third grade and kindergarten provided by the hybrid school we're using this year, while continuing with our own math and science programs. The boys, especially Bearclaw, have been challenged by the amount of work required for the humanities program.

Shortbread's kindergarten class at the hybrid program is focusing on early phonics and handwriting as they go through a set of "letterbooks". As you can imagine, there is one book for each letter. They are cute, but on the first day of use, Shortbread exclaimed, "That looks like a baby book!" He had a point. However, he's warmed to using them and loves going to class, taking part in "sharing time", and playing with his friends.

Bearclaw's class puts a heavy emphasis on grammar, using both Shurley English and some exercises from Easy Grammar. The best thing to come from this is their recent work in writing, which has helped Bearclaw learn to outline and write a 3-point expository paragraph. This is not something I expected him to be able to do this year, and I'm happy to have had the help of his teacher in working on it.

The third grade curriculum also includes spelling, vocabulary, and critical thinking, but history consumes the bulk of time not spent on grammar. Using Biblioplan and SOTW, we've been using Bearclaw's history work as our family history study. Currently we are studying the early colonial period of America, beginning with Jamestown and moving on to Plymouth Plantation. Our studies have included investigating the Native American populations that the colonists were in contact with, and the growth of the slave trade in North America. We've also looked at what was happening in Europe during this time, including the government of England and Scotland and the Thirty Years' War. Throughout it all, we've seen the overarching impact of the divide between Protestantism and Roman Catholocism.

Here are some of the highlights:

The first day of classes-

Making Native American pinchpots and colonial hand-dipped candles-

Making hasty pudding as the Indians taught the colonists-

And making homemade shortbread when we studied Scotland-

So now I think it's time I joined Kris's Weekly Wrap-Ups. Six weeks of review forces me to drag around too many photos!