My ds and I are loving CTC! The way the history and Bible are woven together is pretty amazing. My ds loves doing his own Bible quiet time first thing in the morning, and
The Illustrated Family Bible with its neat pics and extra information in the sidebars keeps him learning more and more. The Philippians music CD has made it easy and fun for him to commit a lot of Scripture to memory. He sings with gusto each morning - it's neat to hear!
Genesis Finding Our Roots also takes our discussions to a deep level, and he did very well with his assignment of how he'd defend his beliefs to an Atheist. It really made him think, and we had a great discussion about a friend of a friend of mine that is an atheist, and a gal in my Bible study group who was an Atheist, and just how this is not so uncommon and will be something he'll need to know about.
He is really enjoying his history book
The Story of the Ancient World, and I can tell his written narrations have grown leaps and bounds since last year. He is very proud to do his Independent History box - and especially likes that "lady who is really excited and talks a lot and knows sooooo much"
(Diana Waring). A favorite so far as been
The Golden Bull - we're reading a fair portion each day, and we both STILL want to read more. The science
Land Animals... book has got him learning all sorts of new things, and his oral narrations from that are showing he's remembering a LOT.
Not surprisingly, my son's favorite things are the history projects, the DITHOR projects, math, and the science experiments. He also is really liking the different types of oral narrations he's doing now - especially the Proverbs one. The poetry painting is one of my favorite things because my ds is finally beginning to be proud of his paintings and is starting to branch out and do more artistic things in his free time (something he never was very interested in before). We are both very proud of his Student Notebook. It is just beautiful. It is creating a lovely keepsake of the year, and it is neat to see his skills growing.
We had a slower start with
Write with the Best because writing creatively is not my ds's favorite thing to do - it does not come naturally to him. In fact, he's the kind of kid that loves copywork - the constant of it is reassuring to him. So, the writing was what I was most worried about for him this year. He was hesitant to get into it at first, and didn't want to try very hard to express himself. BUT, his first descriptive piece was the best thing he's ever written!!! We got out the thesaurus to change out some words to make them more descriptive, and he was reluctant to do this. However, once we'd changed a few words, he got really excited and changed about 5 more on his own. I shared his rough draft about his 3 wheeler in an earlier post (and I'm so proud of him - now with his editing the changes made it even better).
This brings me to the geography - WOW! It's written as if to make him feel like he's on a trip with the author exploring the Bible lands. I'M learning so much as we do it too. The reason I thought of geography after writing about
Write with the Best is he wrote 3 descriptive paragraphs about places he'd learned about in Turkey in geography (for his travel log) - and they were awesome! He followed the steps he'd learned for writing a good paragraph in
Write with the Best (I know because he listed them off for me, putting up one finger for each of the five points as he said them) before he even began. I love the carryover between subject areas I see. He also loves the "press record" interview type discussion at the end of the geography reading - we pretend we really have a microphone, and I try to sound like a reporter as he tries to sound like a real person being interviewed. Too fun!
So - CTC has been wonderful for us! Just the right balance in so many ways! For all of you doing the previous guides, keep helping your dc work on developing those skills like - oral narrations, written narrations, grammar, research, vocabulary, notebooking, science lab reports, etc. - there is a HUGE payoff to honing these skills and creating good habits as you move through the guides. Having spent the time with my ds on these skills as they were written in the previous guides' plans has made this year an incredibly smooth transition! We can't say enough good about CTC!
In Christ,
Julie