Our year so far

We have made it through the first 2 weeks of school!  Usually, the first few weeks of school involves a bit of tweaking and changing until we find the right flow, but I think we have found our groove again finally.  The biggest exception to that is my 3 year old, who generally is not the most cooperative child and is proving exactly the same for school.  We did expand our classroom, however, over the summer, and my most easily distracted children are around the corner now and his antics are not causing major problems.  I know he will settle down into our rhythm with time.  He also potty trained himself on his own the past two weeks, so I can't be that frustrated with him-ha!

We started out our year this year studying what is history and we read the Magic School Bus Shows and Tells about archeology and Archeologists Dig for Clues to go along with our story of the world reading.  We also read You Wouldn't Want to be a Mammoth Hunter.  If you don't know this series of books, they are awesome.  Funny and entertaining, but good solid history under the humor.  For our history projects, we drew a cave painting which we created on crumpled grocery bags and they taped them underneath tables and drew from laying down.  Lots of fun.  We also started one of my favorite books of art history for kids called Learning About Ancient Civilizations Through Art.  It discusses specific art--in this case, the Lascaux Caves in France--and then gives additional activities to do related to that discussion.  My new logic stage student also worked on learning to outline her Kingfisher text and began her new drawing curriculum.  We start more technical art studies in 5th grade.

This week, we dove into the 1st of a 4 week study of Ancient Egypt.  We made pharaoh crowns, felt papyrus, burned incense, and read about the great Spinx to go along with our Story of the World reading.  We also created cuneiform clay tablets when we discussed the beginnings of writing and compared Sumerian writing to Egyptian hieroglyphics.  And, we also watched a documentary on Netflix about Ancient Egypt.  My logic stage student began a Greenleaf Guide to Ancient Egypt to go along with her Kingfisher outlining.  Much more Egypt to come! 

My high schooler is actually on the Middle Ages this year, and approaching history as a great books study.  I will write more about that soon. 

For science, we dove into Elemental Science and are loving learning about habitats for the little ones, and cells and classification for my logic stage student.  So far, we have found the curriculum to be well laid out and explained.  I love that it isn't a textbook, but sends us to a variety of resources each week, with a variety of activities to go along with it.  My grammar stage students began a diorama project that they will be continuing for their animal studies. 

So far, our studies are going well.  All kids began a new year of Math-U-See and are continuing with their language studies and additional work on their own in the mornings.  My 1st grader is progressing quickly with reading and my kindergartener is finally blending sounds!  Phonics has been more of a struggle with both of those 2 since they spoke Russian for the first years of their life, but we are finally making quick progress.  We are also working on their language processing issues with lots of listening activities including Listen and Learn Phonemic Awareness from Lakeshore Learning, as well as their regular speech therapy.