Just-a Dragging Along : Half a Hundred Acre Wood

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Despite a rather inconvenient, interrupted start, we have (finally, sort of) launched our school year (or, in our case, “scooted along dragging our mufflers on the gravel” would be a much more accurate description.) As I recount what we’ve done, should I mention that we have been at it for a whole month now?

We have done some really important things like…

Buying a car to replace the one that was smashed to smithereens this summer. (We are a one-car family, so this was pretty much a necessity to work into the schedule.)
Inviting 60 people over at one time (35 of which were children) for our annual Back-to-school Cookout, and then getting together with several others several other times in the past few weeks. In case anyone wonders, socialization is NOT our problem (unless it’s too much socialization. I might agree with you on that one, but I really like socialization!).
Visiting our family in Georgia to experience the Fly High Hot Air Balloon Festival at Callaway Gardens

Tearing Hiring someone to tear out the walls in our guest house. (That has been on our to-do list for about two years now. That task would have definitely qualified for the show Dirty Jobs.)

There! It’s empty now! In another year or two, we’ll have some walls up! (maybe)

and fishing on the lake.

This was Levi’s first catch! Talk about important!

But, as far as what is deemed “school work” (not that fishing is not “school work” but, to be honest, we did not use it as a dissection opportunity, nor did we classify the fish or even talk about its life cycle – Gary didn’t want me to spoil it), here’s what’s been happenin’ here:

Our Bible Time has morphed into a routine that includes prayer, Bible study, scripture memorization and a Character focus. This really is by the grace of God.
Prayer: At breakfast time we’ve started using my personal prayer journal, Lisa Whelchel’s Busy Mom’s Guide to Prayer, to pray for each other each morning. We’ve finally started placing our prayer focus for each category on a little scheduler pocket chart that I bought from the Target dollar bins a couple of years ago. You can see what our prayer chart looks like here.
Bible Study: We finished studying the Book of John with the PictureSmart Bible. We have continued on with the Book of Daniel, since that is the other free trial download. Stephen and David asked to use this for our Bible study for the rest of the year, which makes this the first Bible curriculum that has been requested by more than one of our children at the same time.
Scripture Memorization: We listen to Seeds Family Worship songs during our wake-up time and morning routines. We also review AWANA scriptures when seated at (or, in Levi’s case, crawling under) the breakfast table.
Character Focus: Our We Choose Virtues card-of-the-week hangs just above our prayer list.

Family Presentation: We opted to go first for family presentations this year. We always like to do this when Gary is home, and, by golly, he was home for our first week! We presented on Tanzania, which gave us a chance to revisit Daddy’s work place one last time before studying about his new work location, Brazil. Read about our family presentation and our little unit study of Tanzania. It really is a fun country to study (thanks to Disney’s The Lion King)!

This was also Levi’s first day of being in the a class!

Read Aloud: We finished our first chapter book for this year, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and followed it up with watching the movie. We’ve also read several other picture books, but I’m too scatterbrained right now to remember any of them.

History & Science: Stephen completed 5 lapbooks (I think David may have cut one thing out for one of them…), which included the free Ancient Egypt Lapbook on Homeschoolshare. Now, I’m sort of banking on these completed lapbooks and the fact that we finished all of Story of the World Volume 1 and part of Volume 2 over the summer. There just haven’t been enough hours in the day to do much history.

But David has been singing and dancing to the Ten Commandments using these great picture cue cards.

We also found a really neat nesting booklet that shows how the classifications are used to hone in on a particular organism, in this case a leopard.

But we have not yet started our Life Science Curriculum. Again, not enough hours in a day.

As for phonics and spelling, David likes drawing “Phonics World” (his own version of “Word World”) on the chalkboard.

Speaking of things going better, language arts is off to a good start, too. I’ve made Stephen’s notebook a little more autonomous (with reminders and copies of Analytical Task Sheets and IEW Grammar Rules sheets, and yadayadayada), so we work through all the different aspects of English grammar and writing much more methodically now. In practicing our first charts, I also discovered that I put too many rows in my blown-up version of the 112 Sentence Classifications Model Sentences Chart. You guys are either really patient with my errors & typos, or no one else has found my version of the chart all that useful…. Nevertheless, I will eventually fix that. Right now we are just scribbling it out.

Latin… is not happening for us yet. I really want to get started with Latin but having only three days at home per week has proven really tough. I really miss our fourth day!

This really does not fit in anywhere, but it was too cute not to capture. David made a sign and wore it around the house while he gave us tours indoors and out.

He also made signs to show us where we weren’t allowed, and then Levi had to make one to post beside his.

And finally, I made some triangular multiplication flashcards because these seem to work better for us than anything else we’ve ever used (and it’s a whole lot less to keep up with). All you have to do is cover the part that you want them to answer as you flip through them. You can grab those here.