Re-starting Our Semester : Half a Hundred Acre Wood

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It has been a time of renewal for us, and we’ve enjoyed bringing a few simple and pleasant things into our homeschool this week, like…

drawing on the chalkboard, and starting our day with a new science discovery, and

…Listening to Classical Music

We enjoyed listening to Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky on Musopen:

(Note that there’s a download limit of 5 mp3s per day.)

To my delight, the boys already knew the names “Stravinsky” and “Tchaikovsky” and have become familiar with their music due to Disney’s Little Einsteins, specifically, Rocket’sFirebird Rescue (Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite) and Christmas Wish (Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite). For a list of Little Einstein’s episodes and art/music focus for each one, go to Wikipedia’s List of Little Einstein’s Episodes and then go to this list to find out which episodes are on which DVD.

(For a list of activities to do for Great Artists, visit our Art Study & Project Ideas for American Artists.)

…and Listening to Literature/Living Books.

As we return to literature in our home, we’ve been making use of the Ambleside On-Line (“Living” Books) Librivox Audiobook Lists:

Audiobooks for Grades 1-4: http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/Recordings_of_Books_on_the_Ambleside_List
Audiobooks for Grades 5-8: http://wiki.librivox.org/index.php/Recordings_of_Books_on_the_Ambleside_List_2
For now, we are listening to Little Women by Louisa May Alcott as a Dramatized AudioBook: Maybe this is an odd selection for a house full of boys, but they think it’s funny how the girls can be sometimes, and they can relate to the characters (e.g., with having their father gone for an extended period of time, or when the sisters bicker at each other). (Other dramatized books and plays are available, too, like Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol, and many of Shakespeare’s works. Click here for a list.) Stephen has already asked to listen to Little Men when we are finished. We also hope to listen to the Chonicles of Narnia series later this year (audio available on Ancient Faith Radio).
For our read-alouds, we have finally finished Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail, and Amos Fortune, Free Man.

Memory Work Practice

Flash cards and songs.

Bible

Confessions of a Homeschooler’s Patience and Selflessness Units have been a great way for us to share Bible stories and thoughts as we start our day and then apply it in real life the rest of the day.

Science

We watched the Elements and Atoms Introductory Video by Khan Academy and completed Classical Elementary Chemistry – Unit 1. (First chapter is free; entire book is $50. This is such a great program! Stephen will read as much of this book as I set out (which is why we usually tackle one unit at a time – but ONLY one unit at a time. After all, I want it to sink in!). He loves it! We all love it!

Dichotomous Keys, Rubber Eggs, and Electrons, Oh My!

Making candy compounds and molecules

For a list of free Chemistry resources (including Element Flashcards), visit this Resource Page and scroll down to Chemistry.

History & Geography

We listened to portions of Story of the World Volume 4. Instead of focusing on the 14th amendment, we’ve enjoyed selections from Homeschool in the Woods (HSITW) Industrial Revolution through the Great Depression (click on the sample tab to download a sample).

Stephen enjoys the Wright Brothers Flipbook he made.

Other things we’ve been piecing together a little at a time are a Bridges Curriculum and a Titanic Lapbook & activities (to follow up on our field trip to the Titanic in Pigeon Forge over Christmas break). These are things we simply are interested in, even though they do not have a direct correlation to anything else (unless you consider the Age of Industry and Immigration…)

The Titanic was really an incredible place to visit!

Our tickets were boarding passes with a real passenger’s story, only we had to wait till the end to find out if we survived! Let’s just say the boys met a better fate than Gary and me!

For Geography, we practiced our maps and read The Scrambled States of America over and over again. The boys loved this book so much that now we have the game.

For a list of activities that can be done in conjunction with 14th amendment studies, as well as our geography this week, visit our this Resources Page and scroll down to U.S. Geography or American History.

Rethinking Essentials

We aren’t enjoying Essentials much. We’re somehow going to scale it back, but it’s difficult to know how to do this exactly. But for those who are considering Essentials (and for myself when I prepare the other two for the program), I have decided to share a list of activities that can be completed ahead of time to provide a better chance of success. I will be posting something more detailed in the future (along with links to worksheets or other resources/ideas), but here’s a list of activities Stephen did before we tackled the week’s assignments:

Identify prepositional phrases in sentences in a worksheet (or excerpt from a book) – label prepositions, object of the preposition, and modifiers. (In doing so, we sang our preposition song.)
Identify appositives in sentences in a worksheet (or excerpt from a book). Give examples of an appositive or insert an appositive in a sentence that does not have one.
Identify a clause vs. a phrase.
Identify subordinate clauses. (In doing so, we sang the relative pronouns and subordinating conjunctions.) Underline subordinate clause(s). State the sentence without the subordinate clauses. (This is the independent clause.)

By practicing these four things, it has become much easier to diagram a complex sentence. (Actually, he was able to do them correctly without my help at all!) As a side note, before diagramming complex sentences, it is important that a child already has a good understanding of modifiers because he/she will be figuring out what phrases or clauses modify at this point. It would be great to study adverbs and adjectives and what they modify in detail before starting Essentials. As a side note, Stephen loves diagramming – the crazier the diagram, the more he likes it.

Stephen practices the Verb Principal Parts Chart

IEW is a struggle, but he so desperately wants to get up in front of the class to share his papers, we still plow through it. (Presenting is his reward for the hard work.) I think this process would be so much better if we could start in a book meant for beginners (such as Fables, Myths, and Fairy Tales, Bible Heroes Writing Lessons or People and Places in Our Community). Or, if we simply used the program as recommended by Andrew Pudewa: EZ+1. But because we have to stick with his class, we’re just trying to use more simplified assignments but still follow the same writing process that is being studied in class. Last week, Stephen wrote a Titanic tale borrowing the conflict from Aesop’s Fable The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf (aka, The Boy Who Cried Wolf). To Stephen’s relief, I decided to leave this little treasure as-is instead of picking it apart using the IEW method (eliminate banned words, include dress-ups, decorations, and sentence openers). And we didn’t type it – I treasure it because there are so FEW handwritten stories for this year. (Something else I am changing with the help of HSITW Great Depression Newspaper Project…)

The Shipboy Who Cried “Iceberg!” (And we can tell he has not done a lot of handwriting this year. We’re working on that…)

Math

Math is a constant experiment for us right now. By now I have almost an entire library of math textbooks and curriculum to choose from, and nothing is really a good fit. Again I say, “Why is it that the concentration of my Master’s Degree is what causes me the most anguish in the educating-my-own-children realm?” I just want my boys to love math as much as I do! (And all I did as an elementary student was worksheet upon worksheet of monotonous math facts. And I liked it and was able to stay focused! So… I’m at a loss, is all I’m sayin’.)

In fact, my computer crashed when Stephen was checking out Teaching Textbooks. (Seriously – it really crashed, but God answered my prayer and it has since recovered…at least temporarily.)