November already!

Taking a break from madly getting the house (sort of) ready for the in-laws visit to do some updating.

Language Arts: Ari is a few weeks into Writing With Ease Level 2, and I'm very pleased with it so far. Narration is still a bit of a struggle, but it's gradually getting easier. We finished up First Language Lessons 3 and have started Growing with Grammar 4. Again, so far so good. Right now it's mostly review of stuff we did in FLL (the diagramming is very, very simple so far), but I think he's going to like the format better--there's more writing, less listening, which I think will suit him well as he's a very visual kid.

Milo's moving along nicely with reading. It's getting easier for him, and he's reading simple books much more quickly now. We read Hop on Pop last week. We've pretty much given up on Headsprout, as he was very frustrated with how quickly they expected him to click on stuff. So now he reads an easy reader to me for a few minutes, then does a page or two of Explode the Code and works on his handwriting (we never finished the Handwriting Without Tears preschool book last year, so he's working on that and then I'll get the K one).

Math: same ol' Singapore. I need to get Ari some kind of super fun thing or other for memorizing multiplication tables and Milo something similar for memorizing addition facts, and then things would go a lot more quickly. Ari and Dave are reading The Adventures of Penrose, the Mathematical Cat together, and are very into it.

History: We're on track to finish up Winterpromise American Story 1 by June, which is perfect. Going well--some of the books are bigger hits than others, but overall they're enjoying the material. It's always a struggle for me to get things ready and actually get some of the crafts and projects done. But we made a bullroarer from More than Moccasins and a 3D map of colonial Boston over the past couple of weeks, so it does get done sometimes. I ordered History Scribe (and Bible Scribe) downloads a few days ago. They have pages where kids can draw pictures and write something go along with all kinds of historical events and people. It's kind of what I had hoped the WP Make Your Own History Book would be like, but it wasn't. I was making some pages on my own, but these are pretty cheap and include pages to use up through high school, so I went ahead and got them. I need to scan in the pages the kids have done--they're liking them so far. There was something else....oh. We're watching Liberty's Kids on United Streaming, and it's a big hit.

Science: still going through Ellen McHenry's The Elements. We made and played the Periodic Table game the other day and are gearing up to make our Periodic Table pillowcases after Thanksgiving. And then we're adding in experiments from various books (last week we did an experiment filling up a cup past the brim with water to show how water molecules attract) and reading. We just started The Mystery of the Periodic Table.

Other stuff: We're finished with co-op until after the new year. The kids really enjoyed the sign language part of it, and Tracey loaned them one of her Signing Times DVDs to get their fix until we start up again.

My friend Di Linh started up an Odyssey of the Mind team, and we're doing that on Thursdays. Here's the description from the website:

Odyssey of the Mind
is an international educational program that provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college. Team members apply their creativity to solve problems that range from building mechanical devices to presenting their own interpretation of literary classics. They then bring their solutions to competition on the local, state, and World level. Thousands of teams from throughout the U.S. and from about 25 other countries participate in the program.

Our team is my kids, Di Linh's almost 6 year old boy, a 6 year old girl, and 2 7 year old girls (one of whom is Ari and Milo's very good friend, Lula). Their problem for the year, that they'll present at a local tournament in March, is to come up with a little skit about a candy factory where all the candy has at least one healthy ingredient. So at the meetings they work on different problem solving and team building type activities and also plan out the play. The kids are completely loving it so far, and there is a great deal of giggling.

And then--planning! I'm deep in the middle of planning for next year. I'm going to put history together myself, but I want to have it all laid out week by week, because I know that otherwise I'll get bogged down and things won't get done. So I've ordered 8 million books or so from various sources, and they've been pouring in all week. Once they're all here I'll sit down and put them in order and come up with a schedule. We're doing the second half (Civil War and after) of American History, with a focus on kids in history. This is partly just how things winded up happening when I looked at the books I was picking out, but then it became more intentional as I realized that would be a good way to make things more interesting and relevant to my kids and to deal with some of the not so pretty stuff that comes up while keeping it age appropriate. I'm putting a lot of emphasis on social issues--the labor movement, civil rights, suffrage, et. al. And I want to work in poetry (maybe a poem a week? I ordered a couple of American history through poetry type books) and music (I'm going to order a few of the Smithsonian Folkways collections).

I ordered the Sonlight 3/4 year old preschool program for Gus, because he's been itching for "Gussie School." It's mostly story books to read aloud with a checklist instead of a schedule. Books from the library would do just as well, but he's very excited about having his own thing, so I got it as sort of an early birthday present for him.

Science? Up in the air. I'm looking at Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. We'll see.