Week 5 Review

Second week with Classical Writing - Aesop.  Love it. 

I also love doing R&S English 4 orally with both girls.  It takes some teacher-intensive time, but no more than doing oral reviews with two separate levels individually, and then explaining things they don't understand to each kid individually.

Love the Memoria Press products: Greek Myths, Famous Men of Rome, Latina Christiana 1, and Grammar Recitations (TM only, that we use for copywork).  Geography 1 is ok; nothing special.

Love the Christian Liberty Nature Reader, book 4, for Charlotte.  Perfect amount of reading and number of questions for her to answer.  Savannah is learning tons in her Apologia Zoology 1 book that she reads and writes a written/illustrated narration about once a week.

Let's see...

Waking up early (myself at 5:00 am to work on online college work) and waking up the kids at 6 am is tough and not fun, but we get SO much accomplished while the babies are still asleep.  Most of the teacher-intensive part of our day takes place from 6-715 am.  Then the babies wake and we eat breakfast.  After breakfast the two oldest do independent work while I play with the babies and clean up after breakfast.

On the days that I fail to get them out of bed at 6am I've had to put on a movie for the babies to entertain them for a hour and a half so that I can do the teacher-intensive schooling, while I'm still being interrupted by sad babies needing me for something.  It is frustrating and takes much longer.  So as much as I dislike waking up sleeping kids at 6 am, it really is worth it.

Maddy's Kindergarten is going well.  We stopped math for a while to focus on getting through HWT-K workbook.  I want her to know how to form all of her letters asap.  She is almost finished with the book.  She is doing great.  She is also learning phonograms.  That's all we do for K right now: handwriting and phonograms.  She writes words in her handwriting book, which I have her identify the two-letter phonograms, the sound each letter makes (whether it is the 1st, 2nd, 3rd sound, etc), have her sound out the word, and then she writes it.  When she finishes her handwriting book we will do this exercise with the spelling word lists in Spell to Write and Read Wise Guide.  At that point we will also pick up math again.

Pre-school is not going as planned.  We have managed to do the letter-of-the-week project every week, and I try to read aloud to them as much as I can manage, but I haven't followed my pre-school schedule at all.  Today was the letter D, which we painted with mud for "dirty."  Dirty D.  B-we painted fingerprint bees and bugs (ladybugs) all over the B.  C stands for "colorful," so we colored the C in many different colors.  They love it.  I'll have to post a picture soon.

Anyway, that's it for Week 5!  The weeks feel like they are just flying by.