Half-baked Homeschool

I am not a writer, but my guess is that even the most gifted writers don't necessarily relish the task of choosing a title. Some are really good at it, though, and their little summary catches our attention, draws us to read the article, blog post, book. I have never been one to summarize what I need to say in a few choice words. Ask my husband.

So I'm switching to week numbers as titles for my wrap-ups. It's not creative or original, but it will keep me from staring at my screen with the empty "title" bar for 20 minutes before I even begin a wrap-up.

HISTORY
This week's history studies educated me as much as the children. I knew almost nothing about the history of Australia or New Zealand before this week, nor had I read anything about Captain James Cook's exploration of the South Pacific. I still miss the American Revolution, but the boys preferred this. Aye!

LITERATURE
Bearclaw is reading Treasure Island. He also completed his literature project (the hybrid school likes projects more than I) for The Sign of the Beaver. He chose to make a story-mobile, which looks great on the branch he picked for it.


We've had sickness in the house, so Shortbread and I have fallen off of our readings. It's onto Mm next week.

LANGUAGE ARTS
The literature project has taken up the time usually allotted to writing, so nothing new there. Meanwhile, Bearclaw's grammar is still keeping him busy with prepositions. They must be important.

Bearclaw has had to do some random assignments in cursive, so that's been fun. I've also had him redo a few assignments when I couldn't read his printing.

As for Shortbread's printing, he seems to be doing well. He is remembering to start his letters at the top of line more frequently. Yea!

MATH
We've completed Primary Mathematics 2A, and we'll do some reviewing next week before moving on to 3A. (Which happens to be PINK, so Bearclaw is skeptical.) Shortbread seems to fly through his math lessons, leaving me wondering if I should have started him on a different level. I'm wondering but not particularly worried about it. We can move ahead later if we need too.

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
The boys participated in a poetry recital this week, with Shortbread's Kindergarten class reciting "The Mitten in the Snow" and Bearclaw reciting "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson. All of the students did such a wonderful job, and a few even brought tears to my eyes. Shortbread just made me smile looking like such a little man (minus a couple of teeth).


To see all the interesting and exciting things other folks are up to, check out more Weekly Wrap-ups at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

I've fallen behind in my summaries of last school year, and we're starting school tomorrow! The only subject that I didn't really cover so far is Bible. I know the county won't ever check on that, but I want to remember what we did all the same.

We covered Bible in the morning during breakfast. This involved memorizing a weekly verse, learning one hymn each month, and reviewing the topic we discussed on Sunday evenings during our family devotion time.

For our Sunday evenings, my husband would read a lesson from a sweet little book his mother gave to me called Little Visits with God. Both the language and the illustrations give away the 1950's publishing date, but an excellent updated version is now available. Although I enjoy the sometimes quaint, sometimes corny aspects of the vintage version, we occasionally had to change the wording so that our children could understand the point more thoroughly.

Each lesson in Little Visits centers on a Bible verse, which is illustrated in a short story. Discussion questions follow and a closing prayer is provided. We found these lessons appropriate and interesting enough to hold the attention of both our 5 year-old and 8 year-old. I think they would work for children from about 3 to 11.

During breakfast that week, the boys and I memorized the Scripture verse from our lesson and also learned a hymn. I generally organized our devotions into monthly themes, thanks to the index in Little Visits, and our monthly hymn alligned with the theme of the month.

If time allowed, we would continue to discuss the week's lesson. This was particularly true once we started on themes of Christian character, which I would emphasize with readings from The Book or Virtues by William Bennett or Everyday Graces by Karen Santorum. Both books provide stories, poems, and quotes to illustrate a variety of noble character qualities.

We also used the breakfast hour for poetry memorization, with each of the boys memorizing a poem every month. The only difficulty in that was choosing a poem; Favorite Poems Old and New provided too many options. Of all our selections, Bearclaw's rendition of Psalm 8 and Shortbread's sweet and stumbly recitation of "The Quarrel" by Eleanor Farjeon were my favorites.