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What was YOUR week Like?

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In Christ,
Julie

World Geography
For "Essentials in Writing" this week, Wyatt finished his essay on "What Makes Great Leaders?" This writing program is helping him learn how to give strong supporting details. Wyatt has always been a 'big picture' writer, which has its good points, but which also can tend to lack vibrancy. His writing used to be quite general, and though it was solid in sequence and information, it lacked interesting supporting details. Now, his writing is beginning to have the best of both worlds - solid focus, theme, main points, and sequence, with excellent supporting details. Hooray! This writing piece also showcases HOD's strong history focus through the years. He wrote effortlessly about the leaders he chose, remembering various details about each of them easily. This was just great fun to read for me, and somewhat of a celebration of our years together in HOD with excellent history-based living books!


When I began researching Charlotte Mason and started reading her volumes, one thing that grabbed my attention right away was the Book of Centuries. I thought this to be a magnificent idea! But, I wasn't sure how I could possibly plan that out over multiple years of education, without having the dilemma of running out of space, or without having the difficulty of my high school ds wishing his elementary type entries weren't a part of his more porfolio-like special high school entries. Well, in the earlier years of HOD, Wyatt made various timelines. In fact, I should do a post on those, as the progression of timelines from Beyond to PHFHG is just plain fun to see! Then in the Hearts for Him Through Time series from CTC through MTMM, Wyatt's timeline marched across the tops of each of his lovely notebooking pages from the ancients to the present day, all in chronological order, and all penned by his own hand. I thought THAT was pretty exciting, as we can put all of his notebooks together, and have one complete timeline of what he has learned! BUT THEN, along came the World Geography "Book of Centuries" - and that totally fit with my dream for my mature ds to have a beautiful Book of Centuries in keeping with Charlotte Mason's ideals. I love that this Book of Centuries will take him all the way through high school, and will be stored in one place, to create 1 memorable keepsake of his studies in high school! Now, that is pretty exciting!


For Wyatt's "Mapping the World with Art" map drawing this week, he drew North America. He has been fascinated reading the book "Longitude," alongside his "A Book of Discoveries." The fact that navigators could not accurately calculate longitude resulted in King Louis XIV forming the Royal Academy of Science in Paris, and announcing the chance to win a longitude prize. Though this spurred on many attempts to find ways to properly calculate longitude, there were many failed attempts. Wyatt found lots of these attempts quite amusing - especially the injured dog and special powder that could supposedly heal time difference example. (I know - it sounds crazy, and I won't even try to explain the details of it, but they truly believed this could work!) Wyatt's oral narration for "Longitude" on this topic was hilarious. He really does have a dry wit and sense of humor!


For Literature Study, Wyatt has begun reading "The Children of the New Forest." He is finding this to be "an exciting read of an adventurous story full of survival strategies" (I am quoting him directly here, as I just asked him what he thought about this new book. His written narration shows one of the survival tactics to pen a wild cow and calf to have access to milk for nourishment. Wyatt is only about 70 pages into this book, but he often tells stories about it impromptu throughout the day - he is truly enjoying it!


Wyatt wrote his narration about Vitrus Bering reaching Siberia and exploring the seas of that coast this week. The guidance for assessing the written narration in the WG guide is super helpful, and being in Unit 25, Wyatt now automatically does each of the guidelines noted, as he knows I'll be looking for them when he reads his written narration aloud to me for our midpoint meeting time. Ahhhh, I love this time of year! Everything is just coming together so nicely now. Wyatt also watched his "Journey of a Lifetime" DVD, and after also reading his "Seven Wonders of the World" book, he wrote facts based on what he watched and read from those 2 different media resources. This is such a good skill to learn! I remember doing this for my college classes. Meshing several media sources of data into key phrase notes is a wonderful skill to possess.


What a super week we have had together in Wyatt's World Geography guide!
In Christ,
Julie

Resurrection to Reformation:
Riley's science experiment had all of us crowding around him like bees to honey this week! You guessed it - it was a mouth-watering edible experiment that HOD does so well. Nothing gets boys to the kitchen quicker than an HOD edible science experiment! After reading "Exploring Creation with Astronomy," Riley did an experiment showing the earth's many layers. His hypothesis to the question "What are the earth's layers?" showed he had a basic understanding of the earth's layers, but lacked the right vocabulary. Using yummy ingredients from our kitchen, Riley made a chocolate-peanut butter-graham cracker model (with a cheerio inner core) and sliced it down the middle to show the layers. After this, he could properly describe and discuss the earth's inner core, outer core, mantle, and crust, and we enjoyed a slice of the earth as he told us about them. His lab sheet was a great final assessment of what he had learned.


For history, Riley has been reading about the Roman Empire and church splitting. He read about Gregory the Great and Constantinople, as well as about famines and plagues. I challenged him to use specific names and places in his written narration this week, and he did a much better job of doing so. My favorite line is his opening line, which reads... "Now in the Dark Ages there were many Christians being persecuted, but after many persecutions Constantinople stopped the martyrdom." He goes on to write... "After that Christianity started to spread throughout Rome, but the western and eastern churches started to fight about Arianism." Not bad for a boy who used to write with zero punctuation and start every new thought with the words "And then..."!


Riley's history project had him making a diagram of the monastery he read about. He used the picture in his RTR Student Notebook as a guideline to follow the directions noted in his RTR guide. He loved this project, and it taught him how to use coordinates and follow directions carefully. I think it turned out so well!


Here you can see his timeline, as well as his research on Gregory the Great...


Riley's Medieval History-Based Writing Lessons went perfectly with his history readings. Here is his written work from compiling his key word outline notes over several days into one written story. This is what it looks like prior to our editing, and as you can see, we need to work on adding paragraphs. However, his wording and the sequence of it are terrific - so I am proud of him for that progress!


What a fun week with half-speed RTR Riley and I had - hope you had a good week as well!
In Christ,
Julie

Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory:
Emmett's introduction to grammar had him reviewing proper nouns. He sang to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Start" the days of the week. And sang... and sang... and sang... My oh my, does that boy know his days of the weeks now! He loved it so much he was still singing it when indeed the starts were twinkling, and he was going to bed. He also wrote the days of the week for his copywork, and he knew most of their spellings as well. What a fun way to learn about proper nouns and days of the week!


We have been learning about place value to the tens and ones this week in Singapore Math. HOD has the best hands-on activities! We got out dimes and pennies and playing cards for this activity. Emmett got to choose 2 cards, the first card representing the number of tens, and the second card representing the number of ones. He then counted out the appropriate number of dimes and pennies to show his numbers, and finally wrote number sentences on his markerboard for each of them. By the time he got to his math workbook, place value was easy-peasey to him. Of course he buddy beanie ball, Spicey, had to look on and help him...


We are having a blast reading "Key to the Treasure" for Storytime. Emmett can hardly wait for each day to come for me to read. He loves it! This week he got to use play dough to build a setting from the story. He then used his setting to give his oral narration for the day. He did a super job of describing the plum fight and Old Honker the goose chasing the children across the field.


We read about Jesus going up on the mountainside to pray this week. As Jesus was praying, a storm came up, and He began to walk on water to the disciples in their boat. We read this historical account right out of Emmett's Bible, and we had a wonderful discussion about faith and the power of believing in Jesus as our Savior. Emmett then built a mountain out of play dough, read about them in science, and 'rained' down rain moving over his mountain from west to east as clouds poured forth. He did this again and again until the mountain was pretty much destroyed. Little boys and water!


I am enjoying my precious little boy so much in my final trip through these younger HOD guides. I am already longing to teach LHTH or LHFHG again. Grandchildren? Right?
In Christ,
Julie

Julie, I loved reading about your boys' week! "Key to the Treasure" was one of my favorite books growing up. I got to share my (very old) copy with my oldest in Beyond. Looking forward to my second later this year.

Over the past two weeks between appointments and illness we have gotten 1 unit done.
Since my dd finished LHTH and we have been so busy, etc. We have only done phonics. She is enjoying herself with that and thinks she is a big girl now. "I'm 5 now!" Is what I hear often.

BEYOND
He finished unit 11 and started unit 12. He especially enjoyed yesterday's story about Samoset. He made an Indian "headdress" and wore it around all day for about 2 days. He decided to try his hand at creating his own spelling list. List 1 is almost too easy for him, and I suppose he thought he needed more. He continually amazes me by what he can do.
Now, if I could get a better attitude about poetry copy work and math ...

PREPARING HEARTS
My son did unit 20, day 4- unit 21, Day 2. He was actually capable of doing more, but mom wasn't. Yesterday he was really engaged in the story and did really well on his science. He loves "Grandpa's Box" and we are nearly done with it.
He did better on vocabulary cards this week, and wrote a great narration for unit 20. His narration had made it to 5 sentences! At the beginning of the guide he could barely do 2 or 3 sentences. This guide was really a struggle in many areas to start off, but we are really beginning to see progress in many of the areas now. I certainly love how HOD puts in skills they need to learn ... many of which I would never think of on my own, and the others not know where to teach them.
I love how he started picking up chapter books to read just this past month. Another huge progress. Thanks HOD

Julie I also love reading about your boys weeks. I have already read Children of the New Forest and I agree with Wyatt, it is a great book with lots of interesting survival strategies. I can't wait for Noah to read it next year.
Here is our week in MTMM http://graceandfur.blogspot.com/2014/03 ... 31013.html

We had a good week of school this week, even with beautiful weather and lots of time outside. We got into the habit of doing a few hours, then spending a couple of hours outside, either on a nearby trail or a park, and then finishing up in the afternoon. I liked doing that. I have always thought it would be good to do some school while my youngest is napping, but we still try to get as much done as we can first thing in the morning. Which lately has been 9:30 or 10:00 before we start. I think we are adjusted to DST now so hopefully we can start getting an earlier start? We will see.

My 3rd born daughter did Unit 25 in LHTH this week. She is doing very well and by this fall we will add some more challenge for her (she will turn 5 in June). Phonics, handwriting. I am hoping to pick up some things for this at the upcoming Homeschool Convention, more workbooks as she really enjoys doing them. By the fall I might actually "require" them almost every day, right now she just gets to do them whenever she wants. Since I have been more consistent with LHTH the past few weeks she hasn't had her other workbooks out much.

My 2nd born did Unit 18 in Beyond. She is in the same place as Emmett! The math activities have been really good for her, really cementing the skills in the workbook. She is doing well with Emerging Readers too, we switched from 1/2 speed to full speed with those this week. I am a little nervous they will get too hard too fast, but if she can do it now we will keep it up. I realize that when I did Beyond with my oldest I was skipping some of the activities and math activities because I was very very pregnant with my youngest at the time. Well, God gives grace and we got through it. I know I wouldn't have been able to do as much school with my kids without HOD at that point.

My oldest did Unit 7 of Preparing. We are loving Grandpa's Box. I really love the way it brings context of the spiritual battle into the familiar Bible stories, and also usually explains an aspect of them that neither DD nor I had thought of before. At AWANA I was teaching a lesson about Moses and the Israelites and how they worshipped the golden calf even after God had brought them out of Egypt, given them manna, etc. The question was "why didn't God just destroy the Israelites?" My DD's answer: because God was going to use the Israelites to bring Jesus. Yeah, that was straight out of Grandpa's Box. I loved that she did a map of Israel this week, the 12 tribes, then she cut it apart and was supposed to put it back together. She tried, then she had to look at the one in her Bible to help her finish it. It was a good activity for her.

So glad to hear of others' weeks with HOD too!

I love reading about what others are doing, always provide's inspiration and motivation! I love to see what we have to look forward to, and remembering the sweet times we had in guides we've already done. Julie, We loved 'Key to the Treasure' too.
Here's Res to Ref: Unit 2 http://saralscott.blogspot.com/2014/03/rtr-unit-2.html