A Few in Review

This week was to be our first full week back since returning home from vacation.  Unfortunately, Farm Boy got sick Monday night, and the Princess and I have had a touch of it as well this week.  Despite our overall feelings of crumminess, we managed to get a full week in.  How?  It must be that Scandinavian blood coursing through my veins.  That, or looking at the calendar upon returning home, I realized we are a few weeks behind where I wanted to be at this point in the year.  Sigh.  I must remember those famous words spoken by a wise woman (my mom),  "How can you be behind, dear, it's YOUR school."
This is true, but each year that passes, more air is exposed to my 'lumps of clay', making them less flexible and malleable. Is it every mom who feels increasing pressure as her students grow closer to Junior High, and High School? I'm hoping they will soon show me signs of what their greatest passions and interests are, so I can guide them down a path to a related career.  Yet, there is time.....

Here is what happened at Aspiring Oaks Academy over the past month:

Math: Both boys are working through Math Mammoth.  J-Straco is currently working on multi-digit division.  Farm Boy has been doing some graphing this week.  I think I am going to have him skip a few chapters, since thus far, there has been no challenge for him. We will be adding MEP once I remember to buy printer paper and print off the lessons.
The Princess has recently discovered our unifix cubes, and enjoys making towers and  patterns.

Grammar:  Both boys have been diagramming the four kinds of sentences, and doing an amazing job!  I thought that the understood 'you' in a command might prove a little complicated, but they had no trouble with it. They are expert diagrammers, and J-Straco proably won't admit it, but I do believe diagramming sentences is his favorite part of school.

Reading: Both Boys have been reading a lot of Greek Myths.  Their favorite is this book by Ingri and Edgar D'Aulaire. We listened to a couple of the Percy Jackson audio books on our way to and from Florida. J-Straco's current read is: It's So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sp*rm, Birth, Babies, and Families.  Farm Boy has been reading Blood and Guts.  The Princess has been obsessed with The Poky Little Puppy.  (I'm about ready to hide that book!)  We had to scan, print and laminate her favorite pages from the book so she can retell the story on her magnet board.
Our current read-aloud is Tirzah, which fits in nicely with our history unit on The Exodus.

Below is J-Straco reading his book to The Princess.  He was explaining the purpose of an umbilical cord.  It was such a cute moment because both boys were present when The Princess was born, (at home) and Farm Boy cut her unbilical cord.

This is what I overheard today after J-Straco finished his reading time:
To Princess: "Remember when you were in mommy's tummy?  You kicked her and hiccuped."
To Farm Boy:  "Remember when you were a sp*rm?  Remember Fred?  Poor old Fred, he really wanted to become a human." 
Should I be worried, or proud???
(* inserted to keep unsavory traffic from my blog)

We have also been gifted with some amazing old books my dad found in storage.  They were the school books used by my great-uncle and great-grandma.  The boys love "The Three Golden Apples" book from Hawthorne, since it is a story from Greek Mythology.  They have been doing their read-aloud-to-mom from these books.

I have been reading, Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education, Nurture Shock, New Thinking About Children, and the Principal and I have been fighting over this book on my Kindle: Outliers: The Story of Success.
I highly recommend all three books. 

Spelling:  Both boys are working through their workbooks.  I need to give J-Straco another placement test, because since he has perfected his lowercase letters, I know he will be able to skip ahead.  On a related note, he graduated from Vision Therapy, a month ahead of schedule.  His therapist was very pleased with his progress.  He goes back for a re-check next week, then if things still look good (and his eyes are not over-converging again) we will go down to once a year vision checks.  He was rewared with MANY new Lego sets while we were at LegoLand.

Writing:  Finding a writing curriculum has been my biggest challenge this year.  The boys have finished WWE, but are still not ready for WWS.  I've downloaded and been reading "The Writer's Jungle" and decided to use that as our curriculum this year.  What a wealth of information! They boys surprised me by really getting into our 'free writing'.  I was also very pleasantly surprised at their editing skills.  This may work!

History/Bible:  This is our first year using Mystery of History I, and I cannot reccomend this enough!  It merges ancient history with Old Testament History so we can see exactly how Jacob, Joseph, Moses, etc, fit in with Stonehenge, The Great Pyramid, and King Tut.  It cements the fact that, yes, the events in the Bible ARE history and did really happen.
Here are some activities we did along side our history lessons:

 We visited the Geology Museum during Creation Week. 

 The kids really enjoyed the exhibits, especially the dinosaurs, minerals and gems, and meteorites.

This was my favorite exhibit.  Fossils of Jellyfish found in Wisconsin.  Our chapter on The Flood discussed that finding jellyfish fossils in Wisconsin is great proof of a world-wide flood.

Below the boys are making cuineform tablets while studying Sumeria:

Science:  They boys have been doing Science with their dad in the evenings.  They finished a unit on habitats and are moving on to mold.  Fun!   

Fine Arts: The boys are both still taking lessons, J-Straco in guitar, and Farm Boy on piano.  They are also in the junior choir at church, which they love.  We try to attend musical events whenever we can, to expose them to different styles of music.  We attended "Seussical; The Musical" last weekend, and will try to catch another play before Christmas.

Seussical was the first play we have taken The Princess to, and she really enjoyed it!