This week was busy and successful but not much to write about. We completed all our subjects. We had a great time. The good news is there's no news. That's a nice change after all the change we've been through.
The chickens are doing great, all 24 of them. The goat is fat and happy. The children are right on schedule and we are feeling settled in our lessons and our home.
We spent several hours this week talking about The Reformation and listening to Morning Star of the Reformation, a biography of John Wycliffe. I wanted the children to understand that the Reformation took time and lots of people, not just Martin Luther. H12 said that the book was interesting and kept her excited. She's interested in learning more about the reformers that helped bring us the faith we have today. I'm pretty pleased. I don't want my children to take their faith for granted. Nor do I want them to adopt mine, just because I say so. I want them to learn and question for themselves, like Wycliffe did.
The switch to spiral notebooks is going really well for us. I don't feel as if I'm drowning in a pile of miscellaneous papers and the dc like being able to hand their notebook to Daddy and have him look at what they've been doing. Having the spiral notebook has also kept me accountable for copywork and dictation. I'm surprised by how much the children like that part of our day now.
We finished reading Signs and Seasons this week too. There's a sense of accomplishment in completing something even if we didn't do it as thoroughly as I'd hoped. We spent our math time this week inside and outside working on perimeter and area of squares and rectangles. On Friday we compared the planets and filled out Venn diagrams. Next week we'll be doing more solar system math activities. It's nice to take a few days out to do something more fun than our routine lesson.
For our read aloud, we began reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo. I was concerned that the dc wouldn't care for it, mostly because I thought it would be too wordy. Evidently, it's a classic for a reason and the dc are anxious to continue the story. I love it when they prove me wrong like that.
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You might call it an uneventful week but you all accomplished a lot and had fun too! Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteSounds like a good week to me. I'm going to 5 subject spiral bound notebooks for just the reason you mentioned. I want everything together. Thanks for sharing your week.
ReplyDeleteHunchback of Notre Dame, really? I may have to add that to my list o books to try this year.
ReplyDeleteAre you doing spiral notebooks for each subject or just the Language Arts? Were you doing the 3 ring notebooks before? I am intrigued by the idea that nothing floats around or falls out of the spiral, but I am trying to figure out how I reconcile that with the 3 ring notebook system suggested by TWTM.
ReplyDeleteI have a shelf of three ring binders for each of my children and they just were not working for us. My dc found them too large and cumbersome. My ds9 is a lefty. Pages wouldn't get punched daily so they'd stack up or float off into the abyss. When they did get punched and included they'd pull through after handling so we'd have to put reinforcers on the page. You get the picture. The organizational idea was lovely but the reality just wasn't working here.
ReplyDeleteNow, each child now has a 70 page spiral notebook. Each morning we put the date at the top of the next empty page, do our dictation/copywork, math, grammar, history and whatever else we have that needs to be written down in the notebook. It's all in one place, it stays put. Even ds9 can manage writing with the small spirals. Nothing comes out, nothing floats away.
I felt that the purpose of the binders was organization and preservation. We are more organized this way. If, in the future, the dc want to look back at their history for the middle ages, they'll be able to find it in the spiral by locating the correct year. We are writing to dates included on the outside of each notebook cover with a Sharpie.