Week in Review: September 28-October 2, 2015

[LynnH]

Hello HOD Homeschoolers,

What was YOUR week Like?

You can post:

a- A picture
b- A blog Link
c- A written synopsis
d- Your favorite memory
e- Anything you want that shares your HOD excitement!

Important Note: If you are linking us to your blog, please make sure it's not just a general link, but to your specific post of HOD. That way if someone reads through these a year from now they can find your share without needing to hunt!

[LynnH]

Here is a link to our week using the World History guide http://graceandfur.blogspot.com/2015/10 ... 22015.html

[rodandmegs]

Unit 10 in Bigger Hearts and Little Hearts...
http://myfullhandsandheart.blogspot.com ... 2.html?m=1

[my3sons]

Bigger Hearts for His Glory:
This history theme has had all interconnected learning about George Washington's Early Years. His Rules of Civility are all incredibly quotable, and much like the Proverbs, just one of them could evoke a lot of discussion. Emmett's oral narrations show his keen interest in Washington, and though we continue to work on not beginning every sentence with 'And then...', he has a knack for repeating exact phrases he remembers from those amazing living history books by Eggleston. I love that they are also so quotable. He enjoyed the story about Washington and the cherry tree. It matched the Godly character trait of self-control that we were studying perfectly! Emmett's Artistic Expression project of using symmetry to paint a cherry tree was such fun - anytime Emmett can paint he is up for it! Emmett also enjoys the artistic creative element of making his own timeline, and I enjoy the 'record' of what we are studying growing as we move through the year!



In classical poetry appreciation, Emmett and I enjoyed "The Marching Song" (a poem well-suited to a weekly theme about Washington). Emmett read it with much bravado and had no trouble picking out the meter by clapping out the syllables. He was surprised at the pattern that emerged, as he clapped out each line (8, 5, 8, 5). He couldn't believe Robert Louis Stevenson had put so much thought into the syllables of each line, and he really enunciated them as he read his poem in his microphone for his brothers (who always provide an enthusiastic, clapping audience for my little Emmett)!


There was another poem about Washington in Emmett's "Stories of Great Americans" book. Emmett was to copy some stanzas of the poem and illustrate them. He asked for me to draw him some lines on the paper, which I did. I find it interesting that 2 of my sons love to have lines to write on, and 1 of them doesn't. I'm glad they learn both skills in HOD! Sometimes lines are good to have, and sometimes not so much. They can make things neat, but they also limit length and sometimes creativity. I like that there are not lines in the note booking pages, as every one of our dc's writing style and size is different. Emmett really liked the 'marching' sound the meter created in this poem too!


Now that we are a third of the way into BHFHG, I like to have Emmett practice a little independence. After taking time to do my teaching parts in the guide, I jot down what he can finish on his own on a marker board, with boxes for him to check off. I then set the timer for a reasonable amount of time to complete the tasks. He is rising to the challenge of becoming a little more independent!


Emmett has been learning about birds in science. He did a neat note booking page about birds' beaks. He also enjoyed doing a science experiment with big brother Riley alongside reading "John Audubon" (a wonderful book about this famous naturalist). Riley occasionally does 1 box each day with Emmett, and they both love it! Usually it is an 'active' box - which is no surprise to me!


In Christ,
Julie

[my3sons]

Revival to Revolution:
Riley is our 'pace setter' this year, as when he is finished with his Revival to Revolution guide, we are finished with our school year. That is because he is my son that started with his new guide on Day 1 of this school year, the other 2 were already started with their guides. Riley has embraced this 'pace-setter' mentality! He is working hard each day to complete his guide, and we all voted to do 5 days' worth of school each week instead of 4 days this year. We simply love to homeschool during these fall and winter months, as opposed to during the spring and summer months. So, we are off to an awesome start! Riley often does 2 subjects at night, so he can sleep in a little bit in the mornings and still finish by late lunch with the rest of the boys. He is a night owl, so he loves this! Plus, he usually does Exploration Education at night, which for him feels like 'playing' or what he'd LOVE to do with his free time at night anyway. Building a race car and doing experiments with it? That's not work for Riley - that's pure fun!

In history, Riley has been reading "George Washington's World," in which he is constantly pouring over the pictures. He loves the hand-drawn pictures in this book, and he is often showing little brother Emmett the pictures, which is another natural connection between what the 2 of them are studying in their different HOD guides. This happens all of the time with HOD! Love that! Anyway, Riley learned about Georgia becoming the 4th state in his State Study, which he is really enjoying. He made monogrammed Prussian coins, similar to those found at the time of Frederick II. These hands-on history projects remind me of all the important things I learned as a child doing 4-H projects. Doing a project with multiple steps from start to finish is such a great higher level skill to acquire than simply filling in blanks on worksheets! He truly remembers what he has read because of the physical hands-on connection of doing follow-up projects each week. Such important prep for the future of high school projects and post high school projects! Of course one of his coins included an "R" for "Riley"!


Riley remembered to divide his history written narration into 3 paragraphs this time! Hooray! He didn't remember to indent the paragraphs, but it's still process, right? He also enjoyed doing his timeline and seeing the beautiful painting of the classical musician Voltaire as family and friends gathered around...


After reading about Qianlong being the Emperor of China and limiting trade, Riley enjoyed the history project of painting his own replica of the blue willow vases often found in China. The lovely pictures shown in his HOD RevtoRev Notebook helped give him a visual aid as he painted...


Finally, in R & S English, Riley and worked on diagramming compound subjects and predicates. There are usually 2 sections of diagramming, so for the first one, I usually draw the skeletons on a marker board and have him point where each word would go as he orally tells me his answers. Then, I assign the other section to be written out in his composition notebook...


In Christ,
Julie

[my3sons]

World History High School
In World History, Wyatt has been learning about Imperialism, African Colonization, Industrialization, and the Boxer Rebellion this week. Reading primary source documents has been an excellent way to learn about various thoughts and opinions of different people in history. There really is nothing quite as powerful as reading the exact actual words of someone! It is almost as powerful as reading the Bible, almost... but not quite, as the Bible is the most living, amazing book ever written, and as it is written by our God Himself! Anyway, I'm so glad that the reading of primary source documents is included in HOD's high school. It is definitely a higher level skill, but it is so worth it! The critical reading questions provided pique Wyatt's interest even more, and the mock trial forces him to ponder both sides of an issue and weigh in with his own verdict. There are way too many important skills covered here to try to explain them, but in short, we both LOVE these activities!


Wyatt has been inspired by Lillian Trasher, as he has read about her in the WH Living Library. Her becoming a missionary to Egypt and taking on caring for sick children and widows is certainly inspiring! The Literary Synthesis Sheet is the perfect way to follow-up these readings. It shows me what he is taking from the book without coming between him and the book - in other words, he still is 100% enjoying the book because the follow-up is not tedious but rather enjoyable too! I loved his conclusion the best..."With faith, all things are possible. Lillian lived and breathed this her entire life!"


Another awesome book Wyatt enjoyed reading this year was "Les Miserables"! He could often be seen lounging on the couch reading this classic, so into it he didn't even notice me sneaking up to take his picture...


For Fine Arts, Wyatt's project was making a Poppy Collage using tissue paper and following Pat Knepley on his DVD. I will be sad when this elective is done! For my non-loving art ds, seeing him thrive in this elective has been like seeing the harvest of all the other years of having him complete HOD's art projects. He is GOOD at art now! He knows it, and I know it. We both are happily surprised by it! He because he never thought he'd be that good at it, and I because I never thought he'd learn to enjoy it. I'm so proud of him!


In Christ,
Julie

[rumkimom]

I never had time to post last week, so this is really for the past 2 weeks.

For the week of Sept 21-25 we did not get much done. my husband had sprained his wrist when we went roller skating the previous Friday evening and when he takes a 'sick' day he is off for the whole week, so he was home all week and when he is home it always messes up our school day. <sigh> My daughter got 2 half days completed, my older son got 2 half days completed and I did not do anything with my youngest (he got lots of daddy time!). That week we also had an ENT appt (takes all morning as it is an hour's drive away), we started speech class at the school with my 9 year old and on Friday we had a field trip (apple farm) with our co-op....and add to that that I was sick. Oh well, such is life!!

Of course my RtR gal had to stay up on Sunday night to see that eclipse!! We also woke up our 9 year old, but he was almost too tired to enjoy it.

Sept-Oct 2 - This week went so much better. We did have an ortho appointment (for 2 kids...45 min drive there), so that killed one day. We managed to get Melody though 5 half days of RtR yet, Steven (Bigger) had 2 full days and 2 half days and Clarence (LHFHG) had 2 full day and 2 half days. Melody is doing so much better in RtR now that she is getting used to the routine. She likes to pick out what order she does things in. On Thurs she did 3 boxes mostly by herself when we went to the ortho and then finished up 7 boxes on Friday. I am hoping to get her to build up to 8 boxes a day so that she gets a unit done in one week, but we will take it as it comes. Highlights from the past 2 weeks....Building a card wall (LHFHG) was lots of fun and Even Melody had to try to do this. The boys enjoyed making Native American blankets. Steven like the salt painting, but that salt just is not really sticking after it dried (bummer). Melody liked her history project and completed her first writing project (we are doing Write With The Best instead due to her writing ability).

RtR with Melody


Bigger with Steven


LHFHG with Clarence


Field trip (apple farm) and moon photos - for those of you who read "Matchlock Gun" that photo on the right is one of the Helderburg Mountains.

[MelInKansas]

It was so good to read through everyone's updates as I sit here with insomnia.... long story... up way too late.

Julie I have gotten a couple of really good ideas reading through your post. I love the markerboard with things to check off for Emmett. My daughter doing Bigger would like that too! She has a handful of things she finishes on her own (unfortunately Mommy should have a box that says "go back and make sure the math that was finished was done correctly" but sadly I don't always go back and double check like I should). I do think Bigger gives them the right amount of independence and as my DD is winding up in Bigger Hearts, I can see she will be well prepared for Preparing, which I expect to start either right before Christmas or right after.

That eclipse was an amazing opportunity! Yes it was late, but other eclipses I have heard about happen at 2 AM or something, it was well worth it to have our kids stay up. The younger ones saw the beginning of it, when the shadow was going across the moon. My oldest saw the blood moon and my husband took several good pictures which I am downloading right now.

Last week we covered Unit 20 in CTC, Unit 28 in Bigger Hearts, and Unit 34 in LHFHG (all done!) It was a really good week of homeschool. But then maybe not such a good week for this Mom and seeing my own impatience and controlling nature sometimes. I am working on being more peaceful, joyful, and encouraging. I am also working on figuring out what is a good schedule for us, and what is reasonable for us to accomplish some days. I wish there was about 2 more waking hours in the day! But of course God knows what we need and He knew we needed 24 hours, about 8 of them sleeping, and then a certain number of others for rest.

CTC has been really interesting, studying Ancient Greece. I am reading Archimedes and the Door of Science to her for storytime and we both really enjoy this book. The mathematician/scientist Archimedes is someone we could definitely look up to! It also reinforces the usefulness of math in everyday situations. The sad situation this week was the painting went very awry somehow, and I also lost my cool about it. At the beginning of CTC I had bought really nice tube paints and as I watched my DD in the middle of painting, she was using up a lot of the paint (and I guess the black had squirted out a lot more than she wanted in mixing the colors, but the bad thing was she kept going rather than mixing the color again when she knew it had too much black in it). I guess it is lessons learned for all of us. My lesson, as always, is how to not lose my temper over these things and to show love to my DD even when I feel she's not being very wise. Overall she has done well with the art projects and I am really proud of what she's done (though I wasn't keeping an eye on how much paint she was using... yikes). She is getting better at written narrations which were something she struggled with all through Preparing and starting CTC. She is reading Naya Nuki in DITHOR right now and we are both learning lots of interesting things from the book (me from reading her pages in the DITHOR workbook mostly). I also think I am seeing a lot of fruit of all of our time in DITHOR now, she is able to do a lot of the work on her own and is doing a pretty good job most of the time at coming up with good answers. It helps me to put in the work with my 2nd born who is just starting DITHOR now - right now I am listening to all of her reading and doing the workbook pages with her, but I just need to remember that it is so important to start her off right in it.

Bigger Hearts we are reading Wright Brothers and their Sister which is a lovely, enjoyable book with a very interesting subject. We both enjoy reading this book together. Right now is a sad part of the story where their mother dies and then Sterchens, their sister, has to take over the keeping of the household. Then they open a bicycle shop. It's just truly amazing how the Wright brothers used their ingenuity and the things they created and did. I think my DD and I just go "wow, that's amazing." But perhaps it's supposed to be inspiring us to be more creative like that, to try to do something we thought we couldn't do. Orv gets sick and then Will is reading to him in bed he gets the idea of trying to improve upon flight - reading about a man who was the world's best glider.

Then there is the end of LHFHG. What fun we've had! The Zippa-dee-do-dah rhyme is by far a favorite. I felt like we were in a musical as we danced forward and back singing about how "we must be ready." My DD is definitely ready for Beyond, we will see if I am ready too! I do like how the History for Little Pilgrims finishes out talking about how all of history is His Story and how we can decide where God is calling us and what He is calling us to be. So inspirational. My 3rd born is the type who is strong willed and determined and will probably do a lot of amazing things in her life as a result and it's fun to hear her talk about what those things might be.

My son has been doing lots of cutting, pasting, and stickering and also listening to audio books and playing outside. It will definitely be more difficult once we have to be inside most of the time, and we are trying to soak up the nice fall weather while we can.

Blessings to all of you!