The first week

Last week was our first full week back to homeschooling. So far so good! I have created a detailed schedule that is mostly a 45/15 breakdown of the day with school or play in the 45 min sections and chores and breaks in the 15 minute sections. Unfortunately last week, I had a cold turning into a sinus infection. I had used every over-the-counter remedy that I could as well as some essential oil solutions that seemed to help at first. Not sure if it was a placebo effect or just too little too late but ended up having to get antibiotics to clear this out. I wasn't on top of my schedule so the older boys felt free to be lax as well. Even so, with the schedule as the guide we still got most of the first week's schoolwork completed and even ahead in some areas.

I'll continue to tweak our schedule with more activities for the little ones. When they start getting loud and into things, I know they are bored and we need to grab some coloring books or playdough. I've pinned several ideas on Pinterest to add more variety to their day.

Last summer, we started this curriculum that I had planned. In history, we had covered the ancient history of Chinese, Egyptians and Phoenicians. This week we went ahead into Greek civilization. We are also covering Greeks in Famous Men of Greece and the Aeneid. Hopefully, we'll get into Homer as well. We found a Trojan horse craft on DLTK kids. A lot of fun!

For grammar, we are using an older text Intermediate Language Lessons. It is less busy work and more of the nitty-gritty of proper grammer.

Math requires a little tweaking for the second week. I have both some workbooks for practicing. We are also using Khan Academy just for it's thorough explanations of all the math concepts. David loves it. He uses it in his spare time to learn computer programming and science. I wanted them to complete two pages of Math in their workbooks a day. When I realized that David had a lot of 2-4 digit multiplication problems, I reduced his assignment. He didn't have trouble doing them, but he did have trouble sticking to it. It wasn't challenging or interesting but he does still need to practice math concepts to be proficient at it. This week, we are going to stick to a time for math worksheets. Do all he can in 30 minutes. Hoping that takes a bit of the drudgery out of doing things that he already knows how to do.

We learned about hieroglyphics in Art. We added hieroglyphics to our timeline in the 35th to 31st BC section. We wrote out our last name in the illustration section. We are also using an app called This Day in History to add other interesting bits of history.

In science, we are doing some experiments about insects. We learned about compound eyes and why bees use hexagonal patterns.

In literature, we are reading The Hobbit. With my cold, my reading aloud ability was greatly inhibited. So we passed the book back and forth between the three of us. It'll be great to get through the book before the third movie comes out in December.

We started on the 4th grade and 6th grade spelling lists. Both boys got A's and B's on their quizzes as well as their Latin quizzes. We are using Latina Christiana for Latin. I love having the CD to help review the material especially since my voice wasn't up for doing it repeatedly.

We are using All About Spelling to help James with his phonological weakness. This past week, we worked on segmenting words with 2-3 sounds. No doubt that he sees words first and foremost before he processes the sound. Even when a word ends with a silent e, he would try to say the e sound because that is what he saw at the end. All About Spelling is going to be a great resource for strengthening his listening skills.

Looking forward to all we'll be learning and accomplishing this week.