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Homeschool Memoirs #8

I am behind, but I did HS Memoirs #8 over on the Phoenix Academy blog.

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Wordless Wednesday – my wild bushes

 

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I’ve started a new blog

I’m just blog happy this week. When I started blogging I wasn’t sure what I would do. The blog was at least a vehicle for homeschool information and anything else I came up with. Now I have a different view and I’m using this blog for a lot more stuff than I expected. I decided to create a new blog to highlight the homeschool things and keep this one for other personal stuff.

 

The new blog for the homeschool is here!

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Weekly Report

Time to talk about what we did this week. It was a pretty productive week, considering we spent Mon and Tues at the hospital where my Dad is. 

Math: Life of Fred lessons 8 through 12. He’s doing really well with the math and confirming that he was ready for the Early Algebra book. He picked up a lot last year (I’m sure his teacher would be happy to hear that, she didn’t get much evidence of it at the time).

Grammar: Continued prepositions and touched on helping verbs and verb phrases with another 5 worksheets in Easy Grammar Plus. He’s got the prepositions down pretty well but didn’t get the verb phrases piece well. I was in class today so Anthony covered school today. He wasn’t ready for the grammar so Connor didn’t get the guidance he needed. We’ll be covering verb phrases again on Monday.

Bible reading: He made it to the Commandments in Exodus this week. 

Vocabulary: He completed Lesson 3 and we discussed missed items in Lesson 2. He’s doing pretty well with this. I need to find more ways to incorporate vocabulary in other things, there aren’t enough exercises in the workbook.

Writing: He did assignment 4 in the EIW Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons. I’m not expecting the Great American Novel from him. 

History: We started with the TRISMS series (it arrived Wednesday)!! For Unit 1 he has done the unit worksheet, Music (Jubal from Gen 4:21), Architecture (the ark), and started Art (cave paintings). Next week we’ll work on the map items for Geography, Science questions, and timeline, as well as discussing various flood stories for Literature. He’ll also do another Architecture worksheet on Çatal Höyük.

Free Reading: He finished another book this week! This is one his Dad got for him last weekend. He read Blood of the Heroes by Steve White. Seems to involve ancient Greek heroes so it fits in with our classical education schedule too! I plan to read it soon so I can see what he actually read. 

What are we missing? Haven’t gotten into General Science yet. We also haven’t started the Logic book. That is going to be very dependent on conversations and we just haven’t had time for that yet. We also haven’t come up with a good physical activity. We have equipment for him to work in the house, but he isn’t really taking that seriously yet. 

We will have another art option soon. A friend from my EMBA class is opening an art school where his wife will teach 2-14 year olds in varous art techniques. Snook Art has classes starting in October. I can take him Thursday as I head down to study group at Queens, and then Anthony can pick him up when class ends. 

Concerns: Typical beginnger concerns I’d say. Is he doing enough work. Am I spending enough time with him. 

Of course, while I’m writing this I’m watching video from weather.com about Hurricane Ike and I’m not sure if Galveston will be around after this weekend. Plus there was a run on gas around here today and some local gas stations are out of gas. Makes my concerns look small.

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HM Something New!

Planning your homeschool is a lot of fun, especially if you’re going to be trying something new. Just like finding a shiny new penny you’re excited to use it.

Since we just started, everything we are using is new. For today’s meme, I’ll talk about the newest item, it just arrived today! I have grammar, math, vocabulary, and even logic curriculum. For history we are doing the Ancients this year. My plan was to use Kingfisher as the history spine and have him outline, write essays, and keep a timeline based on the Kingfisher pages. I don’t have the time to monitor that and he doesn’t have the motivation to go off on his own to do research. I was really feeling like I needed to find an alternative, when I spied a blog where the 9th grader was going to be using TRISMS. Since I follow these curriculum links like it is compulsive, I found myself poking around the site, which had a banner advertising that their Ancient History package was selling for 1/2 price. It looked like it covered the right stuff but with worksheets to give him an idea what to look for in topics like art, music, architecture, geography, and more. I took the plunge and ordered it (for 1/2 off!).

I spent some time after work today reviewing the materials and making a few notes. I have divider labels so I can find the different worksheets and created a document for the Unit where I can list the things he is supposed to look up (the art, music, and architecture worksheets are blank so I need to tell him to look at cave paintings, what Jubal did (father of all who play lyre and pipe [Gen 5], and the ark). I’m looking forward to starting on this tomorrow.

Title: Discovering the Ancient World

Author: Sally Barnard, Linda Thornhill

Publisher: TRISMS, Inc.

Edition: 2001

Book summary: The package includes a User’s Manual which includes the unit study guide and assignment descriptions, the Student Pack of looseleaf worksheets, and an Answer Key.

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Category: Home School  2 Comments