We just finished up week 18 of our Core C (second half of world history) and Language 3 studies and got through about four weeks of science. Hannah also likes to hover when I’m reading Ben’s stuff, she remembers a lot of the stories and enjoys hearing them again.
Morning devotions continue with Ben’s bible readings and a secondary reading by Hannah out of the bible during her reading time and a few supplements from Awesome Book of Bible Facts.
In history/social studies, we still read our main info from Child’s History of the World and Usborne World History. We’ve moved into the Middle Ages and then the early world explorers and discovery of the Americas and subsequent conquering of the native peoples in those areas and we just started a unit on the Renaissance which Hannah is excited about. Our timeline is starting to fill out a little bit and Hannah can see things that are happening in one part of the world at the same time as other things in a different part of the world. We continue to enjoy our Geography songs CD and learning the countries of the world. We also read about a couple countries or people groups each week in a book called Window on the World. We try to find those countries again during prayer time the next day.
For read alouds, we read The Door in the Wall about a young boy who lived during the time of the plague in England, A Cricket in Times Square was a fun story about a cricket who gets transplanted to New York city by accident, and we really enjoyed The Apprentice which was set in the Renaissance about an aspiring painter apprentice.
In language, Hannah read The Paint Brush Kid, The Littles, Third Grade Detectives #2, and we started a reader called Viking Adventure. She’s learning some more complex spelling and phonics rules as well and continuing to work on her paragraph formation skills.
Unfortunately, we only made it through 4 weeks of science. Science gets dropped whenever we have an outing or activity in the afternoon so I usually double up days when we do get to it. We’ll have time to finish the extra parts later. Hannah finished up her unit on the human body and is now in a unit about all the different types of birds. Not too many experiments in these weeks.
Math seems to go well most of the time. She seems to have a mental block against subtraction. She is good with multiplication and has started some early division, but every now and then she’ll completely forget how to do her subtraction problems. I don’t know what that is all about. š We have some fun videos called Mathtacular that show simple tricks and short explanations of math topics. The kids will watch them every now and then.
We continue to be busy with some extra activities.
– We try to make the weekly park day just to get out of the house and see some friends.
– We met up with some friends from Austin to finally make a trip to the local children’s museum, which we really enjoyed. We will be back!
– We had a bike and scooter day with our elementary age group. At home, we have been conducting a chicken experiment. We already lost a round of chicks to our dog and went ahead and got 3 older chicks to replace them and hopefully start getting eggs sooner.
– We have a house going up down the road from us so the kids got to watch them pour the driveway last week. They thought that was fun.
– On days we stay home, we try to get out to the creek or play in the back or ride/scoot on the road. The weather has been so nice, we’ve been doing some of our reading outside too.
– We also had three weekends in a row that we were out of town seeing family.