Week 3, Still Enjoying It!

It is unbelievable how fast the time is flying. We've finished our third week of homeschooling; since we only officially school four days a week, we're done by Thursday afternoon. Fridays will typically be a combination of a co-op morning with other homeschooling kids, speech therapy at our local elementary school in the afternoon, and a more relaxed schedule overall (translation: work time for me, hopefully!); this Friday, however, DH will take the older boys to their current favorite place, a local par 3 golf course. Our co-op starts tomorrow but with the weather so beautiful here right now, and with the beginning of preschool next week for our 4-year-old, this Friday is the only day for the foreseeable future for the three of them to do this. I love that we have the freedom and flexibility to be able to take off and do something fun like this! One of the wonderful blessings of homeschooling.

This week, we studied a variety of topics...Jesus, Jamestown, Pocahontas, the Science of Air...we started Latin, which was lovely and fun and with Prima Latina, not at all intimidating; even Ron (DS 4) now says "Oremus!" before we say grace or do our bedtime prayers. ("Oremus" = Let us pray.) Our Bible/history/geography/science curriculum, Adventures from My Father's World, incorporates craft activities each week, but not so many that I'm overwhelmed by them. Today, the boys made Jesus window posters, which turned out pretty well overall.

We've been working through Singapore Math 1A, some of which is review and some of which is brand new, switching from our summer use of Math-U-See. MUS was great at helping solidify basic math addition facts up to 20, but I was really curious about Singapore Math after having read so many great things about it, so I decided not to complete MUS Alpha right at the point where we would have finished subtraction, because I didn't want to have to change to a different way of thinking about subtraction when we switched to Singapore. So far, I like Singapore Math; it requires preparation on my part to be able to understand their conceptual method before I can present it to Harry, and it's totally different from how I learned math, but I think it's definitely better than how I learned it and for now we'll keep sticking with it. We are definitely beefing up math compared with Harry's experience in school last year; we do drills 2-3 times/week, and we bought a Leapster for both the older boys to play with as a way to solidify their math facts, so Harry likes to use the Jedi Math program there as well. In my mind, you can't do too much math!

For this first year of homeschooling, I have scheduled in frequent "light weeks", and next week is one of those. We'll do some math and some Classical Writing Primer, perhaps, but otherwise we'll just try to reinforce things we've talked about these past few weeks through fun activities like lapbooks, something I'm eager to start trying out over here. Stay tuned! =)