Wow! We’ve completed six weeks of homeschooling! This was supposed to be our last week studying Prehistory, but there are still some materials I want to share with Lillia, so we’re going to extend it for another week. I had originally planned to have six units, lasting six weeks each, for a total of 36 weeks (or 180 days) because that is the number of “regular school” days. But, what difference does it make if we go longer? None. We are the captains of this ship.
Some highlights from our week:
— We started Life of Fred: Cats, in which we learned that the Big Dipper is an asterism (a pattern of stars that is not an official constellation), and that addition is commutative but subtraction is not.
— We read some library books about Prehistory, including An Ice Age Hunter by Lucilla Watson, The First Dog by Jan Brett, and Discovering the Iceman by Shelley Tanaka. This last book, about Ötzi (a 5,300 year old frozen mummy found in the Alps in 1991), gave us the opportunity to see how theories about the past change as new evidence comes to light. We have learned a lot more about Ötzi since Tanaka wrote her book in 1996, but I still feel the book gives a lot of valuable information about Ötzi’s life, and about life in general during the late Stone Age. We also read Mammoth Bones and Broken Stones, by David L. Harrison, about human migration to North America. I also have a library video about the major theories regarding the peopling of the Western Hemisphere that I hope we can watch next week.
— We learned cursive “B” and “b” (again), and are still having great success with the New American Cursive program.
— We learned the Latin letters H, Ī, I, K, L, M, N, Ō, and O. We’re looking forward to moving beyond the alphabet and learning some new vocabulary words next week.
— We finished the first week of our new language arts program. Two days this week Lillia had to read Aesop’s fables aloud and then draw a picture to go along with the story. This is a different, slower approach to doing narrations, an activity she has resisted in the past. But, being able to paraphrase something that you read or hear is an important skill to learn, so I am pleased that this program will help her to do it with more confidence.
And, what does the baby do all day? It occurred to me that this is a blog about our little one, too, because he is also learning. He is a very busy boy, and his play is his work. During a typical day, and besides climbing on every piece of furniture we own, he…
…has sensory experiences,
…makes works of art,
…and, plays.
