Week 2, RTR

Week 2 was just as successful as week 1! We had a great time and began to feel a bit of routine settling in. We are able to finish our work much faster than we did in the first week, most days being done around 1:00 or 1:30. I am learning how to get things ready for the next day a lot faster too, which really helps! With four kids I was spending way too much time during the first week getting all of the next day's things laid out. But it's getting easier now! Of course, we are leaving to go to the beach for a week, so we may have to start back over a bit getting settled in, but the beach is worth it!

Here's how our schedule usually works:
We start our day with a morning meeting time. We pray, say our Bible verses that we've been memorizing, sing a song, and say a pledge (the know US pledge, we are also working on learning the pledge to the Christian flag and the pledge to the Bible). I give them any instructions they need for the day and then the three big girls leave to go do English and math. Then I work with Elianna on her kindergarten work. This is usually from 8-9. We spent the first two weeks going through the days of creation, reviewing letters and numbers, getting familiar with the calendar, beginning our count to 100 game, doing All About Reading, and Math U See Primer. She's doing very well! In math, she's completed 7 weeks of work in 2 weeks! Obviously, it's all review, but it's nice to start out slow and not overwhelm her right away.

After that, we do our My Father's World, Rome to the Reformation. I've allotted two hours for this, but we seem to be getting it all done in about an hour or hour and a half. We are deep into studying ancient Rome now, and the girls are fascinated with it! We watched a you tube video one day from the series, Horrible Histories, about the murder of Julius Caesar. We really enjoyed that and hope to find more to go along with our lessons!












More pictures from our Ancient Rome studies:
Playing a game called Odds and Evens that Roman children played.

Practicing how researchers translate old alphabets and learning how the Bible was translated into what we have today.

We built a water clock like the Romans would have used. Here they are watching the water drip down as we mark it on the bottle.

Now we have a water clock and can time up to 35 minutes with it!

During this time, we also learn out Latin roots. We are making our way through numbers 1-10 right now. This week, we learned 3 and 4.

Art and Music happen here too. Right now, we are studying Hadyn in music and perspective in art.

At some point here, we begin our science. Kaylin is doing her own science so she breaks off to do that. The rest of us are studying anatomy right now and at the moment, we are learning about the parts of the human body. We are doing some basic things right now and studying the brain and how messages get to your body. They did an experiment one day to learn about the right half the brain controls the left half of your body and vice versa by crossing their arms and being asked to wiggle certain fingers. It's harder than it looks!

One of our assignments was to make a mnemonic sentence to learn the parts of an organism in order from smallest to largest. I love the sentence we came up with, lol!

When we are all done with science, Kaylin does her writing, Annlee goes back to finish her work from the morning and can also do Spanish on the computer, Elianna can do some education apps on the iPad or play with her school toys, and I work with Maryella on reading, spelling, writing, and English. This is scheduled from about 11-12, but we usually get started a little earlier. Kaylin is loving her writing curriculum, Cover Story! Here is the first assignment she was asked to do - descriptive writing. She has done other things, but this was the first official one. I know there are mistakes, but as far as meeting the descriptive writing assignment, I thought she did a great job!

After that, we eat lunch, then the little girls can play while I work with Kaylin and Annlee on spelling, writing with Annlee, and answer any questions either of may have had with their work that day. So far, our schedule is working very well! We did just decide to switch our English curriculum, so that may throw a kink in things, but I think it will all work out fine.

Now, we are off to the beach for a week to relax in the sunshine and unwind from a busy summer and start of school. I'm excited to see all of our family and get to make some awesome memories again!

Year 3 has begun!

Our first week of school for year three has come to a close and it was a huge success! I see glimpses of things to come and I think it's going to be an amazing year! We now have all four girls home for their schooling and we couldn't be more excited about that. Elianna enjoyed her years at the preschool, but I am so glad to have all my chickadees here with me now! So for the 2014-2015 school year, we have a Kindergartener, 3rd grader, 5th grader, and 7th grader! I can't believe how time flies! It seems just yesterday that Kaylin was starting Kindergarten and now it's Elianna's turn. Such a reminder to enjoy every moment because it passes so quickly!

Day one began with a fun surprise of new school supplies. The girls said it felt like Christmas! What a fun way to start our first day of a new year!

We are continuing with many of our same curriculums because they are working well.
They are all doing Math U See.
Kaylin - Zeta - decimals and percentages
Annlee - Epsilon - fractions
Maryella - Gamma - multiplication
Elianna - Primer - an introduction

For history, we are continuing with the My Father's World cycle that covers history, science, art, music, and Bible. We are in the third year of the cycle this year which covers Rome through the Reformation in history. Our science covers anatomy and astronomy this year. Art will continue from last year with our God and the History of Art books. Music will cover another three composers - Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Bible will cover the New Testament. I think we can safely say that these are the subjects we are most excited about! There are so many fun things to do and study!
This week in history we started with the founding of Rome. I dressed up as a Greek slave because many times Greek slaves were hired to come in and teach Roman children. Of course, as girls, they probably wouldn't have been taught most subjects, but that's no excuse for today, lol!

The girls made writing tablets like an ancient Roman student would have used. They LOVED these!

We learned about the legend of Romulus and Remus and made notebook pages for their history binders. Here is Maryella's, I love it!

We learned about Roman numerals and made cookies to represent their ages. They loved that! While they ate their cookies, they each made an abacus. We made these small so they can use them for their American Girl dolls.

This is another notebooking page we made this week about the Punic Wars. I love when I get to make the pages along with the girls. I have just as much fun and learn just as much as they do!

On our first day of school, we went out to eat. Many ancient Romans lived in apartments and weren't allowed to cook in them due to the fire hazard. Therefore, they would eat out at restaurants similar to our fast food restaurants today.

We will be studying Latin roots as a part of our history this year and we started out with learning Latin numbers. They make a little page to help them remember each number and eventually we will have enough Latin roots that we can play our game like we did with Greek roots last year.

We are spending a little time at the beginning of the year to learn how the books of the Bible came to us. We made these fun tiny libraries to remind us of the types of books and the order they are in. The girls were excited to use these with their dolls as well!

Here are a few pictures from our science studies this week. We will start with anatomy and this week we studied cells, cell types, and cell parts. The girls had fun working a puzzle I found, drawing cells and learning the names of the parts, making a cake that looked like a cell, and learning about permeable membranes.

Maryella and Elianna will be using All About Reading. Maryella is in level 3 this year and Elianna will be beginning level 1. Elianna is so excited about learning to read! She's a sponge and ahe's so ready to get going!

Annlee and Maryella will continue with WriteShop. Annlee is in book E and Maryella is in book B. This is such a fun writing program. We are really enjoying it.

We've got a few newcomers to our curriculum line up this year.
For grammar we are trying Christian Light Education for Kaylin and Annlee. It's got a lot of the same content as the program we were previously using, but the girls can do it more independently. Maryella will continue with Rod and Staff, book 3, because she still a little more help from me.

Kaylin has some exciting new things going on this year. She is using a new writing curriculum called Cover Story. By the end of the year she will have written an entire issue of her very own magazine. She will learn about all kinds of writing styles as she puts her magazine together. I can not wait to see what she comes up with!
She also has a new science that she is doing by herself and completely independently. It's General Science from Apologia. It's tough but so far she's handling it very well and doing a fabulous job. She really enjoys doing her science experiments all on her own and then explaining them to her sisters!

To finish off our week, we did these fun pictures. I had seen the idea on a homeschool board and thought it was so cute. We will do this every year and it will be fun to go back and see the changes!