The Day After Christmas

We're all recovering from the holiday, over here. The boys are playing with their toys and reading their new books while Dan and I clean up and get the house back in order for a new week.

As we approach the end of the year, it's good to look back at all we've done this "semester". Part of me doesn't like breaking up the boys' learning into arbitrary sections and segments, but sometimes it's nice to be able to look back over my notes and see where we started in August and where we are, now, five months later.

We're studying the medieval period this year and started in August with the Romans and Celts, c. 500AD. This week we're studying knights and Samurai, c. 1450. So in the last five months, we've covered almost a thousand years of history.

We're almost finished with our earth science, and in the next few weeks will be covering the last two sections on the atmosphere and weather phenomena. Jonathan has given me a detailed narration on each chapter we've covered, and has also given me lists of "Five Things I Learned" from different videos he's watched and detailed books that he's read. He narrates and I type them out as he does. Then I just print them out, and he dates them, punches holes in them, and files them in his Science notebook. In January, we'll start our study of astronomy until summer. I'm really looking forward to that, as is Dan, who is going to be more active in helping me out with the hands-on telescope stuff in the evenings.

For spelling, he sped through a review of his 2nd grade book and is working through the 3rd grade book, now. We only do a few minutes every morning, and spend the rest of our spelling time working on words that he's misspelled in everyday usage. I thought about dropping the books, but they do give him practice in alphabetizing and proofreading, and he doesn't seem to balk at them at all, so we've continued with them.

For writing, we're working our way through the cursive alphabet, and he also practices his manuscript writing by copying poetry and writing out grammar or spelling rules for his notebooks. His manuscript writing is improving over time, and while he was excited about cursive writing in the beginning, I think it's lost its charm. We practice creative writing by working from Writing Down the Days and Doing the Days, which both have fun exercises centered around a sort of "This Day In History" theme. He really enjoys both of those books.

We're halfway through each of the two grammar books we use, and they continue to be easy for him. We do most of the work orally and it goes quickly. I don't think we've ever come across anything that's given him any trouble. I'm trying to remember if we've come across anything that he wasn't already familiar with. It's been lots of review and filling in some of the little knowledge gaps, but he likes that the lessons are short and easy. That way he can go back to his reading, which is where he seems to absorb most of his grammar knowledge through osmosis.

We're back to doing Saxon math every morning, and we're a month or so ahead of schedule. I keep skipping the sections that would just be repetition of the stuff that he knows well, and it seems to be effectively warding off the boredom bug. It's not his favorite thing to do, but he's been getting excited about how much more quickly he can get things done now that he knows the math facts. I also check out lots of supplementary math books from the library (I've listed some over in the sidebar) and those keep him fascinated in math as a process and as a mental game. He really enjoys the supplemental books that I leave scattered about the house.

He's off Latin, again, at the moment, but he seems to drop it for a few weeks and then pick it back up again. I've just been having him dabble in the Latin books at his own pace and then he writes down words on flash cards every once in a while. He has lots of cards, so we practice them in sets, twenty or so at a time, and he does really well with them. He has such a good memory, lucky boy.

Benjamen and I do one structured "lesson" every day, alternating reading lessons with math lessons. He's reading really well, but likes to look at the first few letters and guess at the words. He also seems to think that reading is confined to our daily lessons and doesn't show any interest in reading road signs or words around the house, though he's constantly asking us to read for him. I don't think he's really ready for reading, but he insists on the lessons, so we do them. We all gather around and I read them all a book a couple times every day and we're reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a chapter at a time, every night, at the moment. They're all enjoying it, even though Jonathan's read it on his own many times.

We've come a long way in such a short time.