It's been a long time!

Wow!  It's been a long time!  We had lots of sickness go through the house and then things just seemed to get busy.  The older two boys are almost finished with basketball.  Dentist appts. filled a week and I've been to the orthodontist more than I care to say!  We've had things almost every weekend (thus no time to update the blog) and then we took a 10 day trip to FL! 

Here's a little update on school... even though I haven't blogged we did get some decent school in.  The kids worked hard before we left and we were all glad to not think about "seat work" for 2 weeks.  We learned plenty visiting FL though!  I'll save that for the next post.

Reading:

All the kids have been enjoying several books each.  Here is a sampling of the books we've been enjoying...

Mary Queen of Scots (both Jayden and Kylie read this)
Day on Skates
Story of Pocahontas Indian Princess
Don Quixote (picture version)  (Jayden really enjoyed this)
Under a Prairie Sky
The Samuri's Daughter
Samurai Castle
Broken Blade
The Secret of the Night Ponies (Kylie's FAV!)
Three Young Pilgrims
If you Sailed on the Mayflower
Uncle Fester's Hat Tree
Various long vowel readers
Case of the Glow in the Dark Ghost
Rose and Riley
Dear Dragon books
Legend of El Darado
Not So Very Long Ago
What's Smaller than a Pigmy Shrew?
A Weird History of Science: Crazy Chemistry (the younger boys loved this!)
Pocahontas: American Heroes Series
Look What Came from the Netherlands
Jamestown Virginia
Bones: Cupcake Mystery
Oscar Otter
The Bear Detectives
Sam and the Firefly
Johnny Appleseed
Bike Lessons
The Magic Beans (Hillert)
Strega Nona
Gilly Gilhooley
Little Red (Hillert)
The Ups and Downs of Simpson Snail
Magic Treehouse: Day of the Dragon King
The Birthday Car (Hillert)
3 Samauri Cats
The Three Bears (Hillert)
Magic Tree House: Civil War on Sunday
Magic Tree House: Dark Day in the Deep Sea
On the Day Peter Stuyvesant Sailed Into Town

Wow... I didn't realize how much these kids read (or are read to!)  That's about 3 weeks worth of reading though!  ;-)

Bryson continues to make great progress through Funix Reading.  He's enjoying this and has completed the first set of lessons.  He'll start lesson 41 on Monday.

Writing/Grammar:

Each of the 3 kids doing WWE completed a lesson a week.  I decided I'm going to start doing every other lesson with Jayden so he can finish WWE4 by the end of May.  I'd like him to be done then because he'll finish his 4th grade R&S grammar at that time.  When he starts 5th grade R&S he'll do the writing exercises for his writing instruction.  I don't want him to have to double up so I'd like him to be done with WWE.  Grammar is going well for all.  The older 2 kids have only about 25 lessons left in their current books so we're going to go to grammar only 2 days a week until end of May.  Rylan, on the other hand still needs to do grammar every day in order to finish this year.  We started the book late so I figured as much.  I started FLL1 with Bryson.  It gives us a little more to do and covers some things I might otherwise not think to teach so it's good.  I won't continue with that next year though.  I'll put him in GWG1 as I like that better.

Spelling:

The older three continue to make great progress in spelling.  Jayden decided he's going to do the local spelling bee this year so we've been practicing extra words for that.  It will be his first try so it will be mostly a learning experience for all of us!  Rylan has been using word lists from SWO and then doing the games on Spelling City with the words.  I don't have him complete the writing exercises in the workbook.  This is working well and he's been getting 100% on his spelling tests every week.  In 4 weeks Rylan will complete SWO A and go onto B.

Math:

The kids are all cookin' along in math.  Kylie hit some geometry which threw her for a loop so we've been doing math together.  Jayden got into ratios right before we left on our trip.  Rylan and Bryson continue to make good progress.  I just have to say that I LOVE MATH MAMMOTH and Maria is absolutely TERRIFIC to work with!  I ended up ordering something by mistake and she responded to my plea for my money back right away saying she'd take care of it.  I'm just so pleased with her curriculum and her customer service.  If you are on the fence about MM... go for it!  :-)

Logic:

Jayden finished all the Mind Benders for 3-6th grade and has started on the 7th-12th grade ones.  So far he's doing fine.  I told him if they get to be too time consuming we'll take a break from them for awhile.  He's also still enjoying Logic Countdown.

Latin:

Both Jayden and Kylie are making good strides in Latin.  Kylie is remembering more and more as we take more time out to review.  She's picking things up easily and well.  Jayden is really getting into some guts in LC1.  We're able to work on more translation now and that's fun for both of us.  He's really starting to understand declensions so that's coming together for him.  I've been having a discussion with him about another language for next year.  He thought maybe Greek, but now has backed off of that.  He's not really sure what he wants.  We may postpone a year... not sure... (although I want to learn Greek so I may get the books anyway!  ;-)

History:

The older 2 have completed weeks 3-6 in SOTW3.  They've studied such things as King James, Jamestown, Northwest Passage, French in the New World, Henry Hudson, Japan (Hideyoshi), Strangers and Saints in Plymouth and the Dutch in the New World.  Jayden's new history notebook is developing nicely.  He has the "history routine" down now and I think is enjoying his work.  Kylie still enjoys SOTW.  Because they both work independently now I use the AG questions to make sure they are understanding.  That leads us into discussions if they didn't quite get something.  Not quite as good as reading it out loud to them, but it's working.  The younger two boys and I have fallen into a good routine of reading a history based picture book 2 days a week (the other two days we read a science book).  The books we read are listed up in the reading section.  They are enjoying this new way of doing history.  I am beginning to understand young grammar stage can just be about exposure!  That's my new way of handling the younger two boys in both history and science.  There is plenty of time for other things when they are older.

Science:

We started Chemistry and I think I mentioned before that it's too much for the younger two and Kylie is just not interested much in chem.  So.... I will give seperate reports on each child...

Jayden:  Is doing very well with ES Chemistry!  It is a jump up compared to work he was doing in Earth Science, but a good jump.  I think it's fitting him well and he is certainly learning a lot!  He started a new science notebook and that is working well.  He reads out of 2 books, records definitions, info about different elements, is building a periodic table as he goes and sets up our experiments.  This week we'll start him writing up his experiments on the lab sheet and taking the weekly quizes.

Kylie:  Decided on studying hummingbirds for her first lapbook.  She is LOVING this!  She's maybe 1/2 done with her book.  If I wondered if this would be a good switch for her... I wonder no longer!  We will finish out the year doing this type of self-guided study with lapbooks.  I may even have her do them next year as well...

Rylan and Bryson:  Science for these two boys consisted of reading through the Weird Science book.  They LOVED it!  They (as well as Kylie) also joined in on experiments done by Jayden.  I'm having all the kids join in on those to expose them to some chemistry without all the book work.  My plan for next week is to have them each pick something they are interested in and we'll read books about whatever that is.

Making Ice Cream to start off our Chemistry unit!

 Yum!!

 Our model of a Helium atom.  This was lots of fun to build!

A demonstration of electrolysis.  

 Bryson enjoyed this one so much he recreated it later all by himself!

Memory Work:

We've been plugging along on our history timeline.  It's gotten to be quite a monster... the kids aren't remembering much of our earlier study... so we review looking at the cards instead of me making them do it memorized.  We still memorize the 8 events for the current week, but they were stressing out over the entire timeline.  I figure there is LOTS of time before us to get it memorized.  If they leave high school with that timeline memorized it will be a lot more than most of us know!  :-)

Science memory work consisted of the first 12 elements on the periodic table by name, number and weight.  Pretty cool they know the first 12 elements now!  I have to do some searching to see if I can find any of the other chem songs on YouTube.  I can't quite afford the CD's yet so we may have to take a break if I can't find the songs.  Once taxes come in I'm going to buy all the memory science CD's from CC.

We didn't get to music at all this past 6 week block.  I'm intending to start that this block.  Hopefully next Friday we'll start that.  The kids are all doing well on their instruments though so I don't worry so much.

 Kylie was in her glory "pet sitting" our friends' rabbit for a long weekend.  Isn't he just the cutest?

We've had LOTS of basketball the past 7 weeks!  Next week is the boys' last game.  Jayden loved it... Rylan decided he's probably not a basketball player.  The game is so fast he can't keep track of everything well enough.  That's okay... he's gearing up for playing baseball this summer!

Well, if you made it through this very long post I congratulate you!  Thanks for hanging in there.  Hopefully I'll get back to weekly posts now.  Be on the lookout for a Florida post in the next day or so.  I'm having lots of trouble uploading picts to PB so it's taking me a bit of time.  I'll post a link to my photo gallery once I have them all loaded.  We had just a perfect trip!