Half a Hundred Acre Wood

Christian homeschooling integrating Classical and Charlotte Mason principles

I receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post. Please see our full disclosure policy for more details. Thank you for supporting Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood through your purchases.

It’s been an interesting few weeks here in the Ferrell household, and as we prepare for our big trip out west, I thought I’d wrap up what’s been a-happenin’ around here as of late.

It was another year where my husband and I were separated by thousands of miles for our anniversary, but the boys surprised me with “anavasary” (hard to spell) gifts. I am so thankful that our children love to celebrate our anniversary with us. I pray for their future marriages – and for their future wives. (That can be taken many ways… and it would be true no matter which way you interpret it! ha!) We talked a lot about marriage over the past week – what it means to sacrifice self for another, what it means for a husband to love his wife as Christ loves the church, what it means for a wife to honor her husband, what to look for in a future wife. These were precious talks with boys who mean the world to me.

LEGO Gary and Brandy sharing a cup of coffee offshore Brazil.

Our schedule has been quite interrupted as of late, but before I get into that, let me share with you some books we’ve been reading…

To tie in with our study of NATO and communism, we read the picture books The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Caldecott Honor Book) and Christmas from Heaven: The True Story of the Berlin Candy Bomber, both of which give a good glimpse into the effects of communism. Due to the boys’ fascination with espionage, David also read Spies! (DK Readers, Level 3: Reading Alone). Our read aloud was Tree in the Trail, which we thoroughly enjoyed! Who would have ever thought reading about the life of a tree [on the Santa Fe Trail] could be so intriguing? It’s not surprising, though. Holling’s books are some of the best living geography books I’ve ever come across:

The illustrations are so fantastic, and each page is loaded with interesting facts that tie in history and science as well. It was fun to compare our Geography Trivium Table with the illustrations in the book. [What’s more, we are traveling along this trail a bit on our big trip!]
The following week (Week 20) our reading selections included The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal and the song “The Erie Canal” from The Children’s Treasury of Virtues. This song is a favorite of our children. They first learned it three years ago as they listened to their Wee Sing America CD.

Once again, we matched up our reading with the trivium tables.

Reading geography-related stories is especially helpful for David (our rather-linguistic, not-so-spatial reasoner) for memorizing geographical locations.
For history, we enjoyed reading about school integration through the eyes of Ruby Bridges – both through a simple reader Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story (Scholastic Reader, Level 2), and through a longer read-aloud autobiography Through My Eyes.

We loved comparing the Rockwell painting, “The Trouble We All Live With” (from In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America) to the same image in the reader and to the photos of the real Ruby Bridges. This Rockwell book has been fantastic for studying art alongside history this year!

We even used In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America as we continued into Week 21’s memory work on astronauts walking on the moon…

Okay, so we have gone a bit overboard with space books in our home, but we’ve collected these during our previous studies of astronomy (and just because our children are fascinated with astronomy). Most of these are readers:  Spacebusters: The Race to the Moon (top right), Space Heroes: Amazing Astronauts (middle right), Moonwalk: The First Trip to the Moon (Step-Into-Reading, Step 5) (bottom right), and Neil Armstrong (Rookie Biographies) (middle left). My children also enjoy the Graphic History series, so we have The First Moon Landing (Graphic History) (middle left).

The readers were great, engaging books for our 3rd-grader, but my favorite of all these books were our two read-alouds, Look to the Stars by Edwin Aldrin (a longer illustrated picture book, bottom left) and Who Was Neil Armstrong? (top left).  It’s great reading the words of someone who has actually stepped foot on the moon, and the Who Was… book includes illustrations that help to understand some of the details of the Apollo 11 Mission.
So… that’s what our reading looked like. We didn’t quite finish all the books because…

…$1,000 worth of Usborne books arrived (which I received for free with my hostess/consultant rewards from my Usborne Launch/Facebook Kick-Off Party), and our children read about myths and legends and science and art, and all sorts of other stuff that was NOT memory-work related. So, it was time to set aside my plans and let them devour the books they desperately wanted to read. I’ve got so much to say about the Usborne thang, but I will save that for a time when I am not traveling the United States with my family.

Other things that happened in our lives in just three (or four) weeks…

…the boys made a zip-line for the dump truck.

…one of the windows in our home was shattered into a bazillion pieces due to… a rock hardness experiment.

…David learned to cook quesadillas.

…Stephen Thomas Edison presented his final Faces of History paper.

…Tommy and Jo and the Kids from Mega Verses visited our itty bitty church (what a blast!)

…I proofed David and Levi (who are not ready for the real thing just yet) with this Memory Work Sticker Book.

…the boys introduced me to the scrabble-type game Quirkle.

…and then it was time to pick up Gary from the airport. WOOHOO! He brought home something extra special:

a Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood guitar! One of his co-workers down in Brazil apparently builds and customizes guitars. Just beautiful!

Finally, I had someone ask me what reading and schoolwork looks like in our home. I’ve got some random pictures to share…

… we usually hang out in pajamas when we have nowhere to go. (Minimizes laundry.)

And… below, David shows us how to make a word sort with All About Spelling, which is our favorite spelling program. I know some do not like the manipulatives, but it has been perfect especially for David and Levi. What’s more, I have learned so much from this program!

So… here’s a hodge podge of our lives over the past month. If this post seems haphazardly thrown together, it kind of is. I started it at 12:00 AM before our 4:30 AM wake-up to catch a flight to Los Angeles. And now I am finishing it in Las Vegas as we head to the Monster Jam World Finals. Over the past month, we have made so many connections to our memory work with great books – and now we are doing the same here in real life as we tour the Great American Southwest. I can’t wait to share with you our adventure over on this side of the country!


By 6 Comments Tagged With: , , ,