Creation to Christ:
Week 2 has gone even better than week 1, and Emmett is learning to follow the directions in his guide well! We are still practicing having him hold the guide in his hands and read the boxes from start to finish (the "I" and "S" boxes, that is), and then I have him share what he will be doing in the steps he'll be doing it as he looks at his guide again. This week we studied The First Cities After the Flood. He really loved the pictures in Dinosaurs of Eden, and he has also been loving his Illustrated Bible for his Bible Quiet Time. He is such a ray of sunshine for me in the morning! He comes in my room with his Bible and his CD player and sings his Phil 2 CD loudly - love starting my day with that joy! I let him sing his memory verses for me after that, and he just loves that! He has been needing some help with his Prophecy Chart, and that's ok because I love being in the Bible with him and talking through it. I'm trying to encourage him to use phrases that repeat from the 2 Scripture references in his prophecy, as well as check his spelling and write a little smaller. Lots to think of for a 10 yo, but he does it quite cheerfully!
He actually remembers quite well how to write cursive! Having only completed Cheerful Cursive and PHFHG's copywork assigned in cursive, I was skeptical he'd remember it at all after a 'cursive-free summer'. Surprise, surprise! He did remember it, quite well, though a few capital letters still stump him, and it is fairly large cursive. Overall, I'm so proud of him and his effort with cursive! I don't expect perfect cursive; it's not practical anyway in today's media filled world where typing/texting/emailing have overtaken penmanship; however, I do want it to be legible, and I want him to be able to read it as well. So, I have him read his cursive work out loud to me when we are checking his work. Nothing makes a kiddo write better cursive then knowing he'll have to read it himself later! I especially liked his timeline Tower of Babel on his note booking pages. He really took his time with it!
Emmett remembered how I like him to begin his science questions' answers by rewording the question at the start of his answer - hooray! Carryover from skills learned last year in PHFHG - love that progression within HOD! He did skip a question accidentally, but we always read through the answers together and try to fix them right away, though we certainly aren't perfect about this...
In WWTB, we had some solid mini-lessons, where Emmett learned to use the thesaurus and learned to choose better describing words. He first found good examples of this in an excerpt from Jules Vern's 20,000 Leagues Under the See, and then found more himself...
In DITHOR, Emmett made a collage about The Little Duke, and for his history project he began making a cylinder seal...
He made a lovely watercolor painting for poetry appreciation and loved reading his poem with gusto...
In Science, he did an experiment showing how sense of sight and sense of smell work hand in hand to help us anticipate what something will taste like... as it involved jello, all the brothers 'helped'. It really did stump the boys, as in a strange turn of events our weird colored food coloring turned the orange jello a somewhat sickly brownish-black color. It took real courage to try THAT jello!
Loving Geography of the Holy Lands! Here's our first Travel Log...
In Christ,
Julie
