Back to School in May

While most people are thinking of finishing up their school year, we are finally feeling like we can get back into the swing of things after the birth of little Vayla two months ago.  Here is a little bit about what we have been up to.

The kids and I finally convinced ourselves that our study of Europe should be done.  We focused on castles and, naturally, knights and princesses.  It was a big hit and a very easy topic to pull off with a new little one throwing us off of our normal routine.  Our book list was huge....lots of stuff from the Homeschool Share website and anything we discovered during our trips to the library.  Our four favorites turned out to be Knights in Shining Armor by Gail Gibbons, Days of the Kinghts by Christopher Maynard, The World of Castles by Philip Steele, and The Making of a Knight by Patrick O' Brien.  I did plan activities, a few coloring sheets, etc to go along with our study, but many of them went unused.  Usually by the time we got through a chapter or a book on our topic the kids were bubbling with ideas of their own.  They would run off and dress up as a knight and damsel in distress or a fancy lord and lady ready to host a formal dinner for the king.  Several of our lunches were eaten with our fingers, since that was the way things were done back then.  The kids created elaborate battle scenes with Logan's fisher-price castle set Dad picked up for him last year during garage-sale season.  We also spent several days creating our own castle from the collection of boxes and cardboard tubes stockpiled in the basement.  Our activities also included some mapwork, of course, and viewing actual European castles online and in my photo album of a trip to Europe.

We wrapped up our study with a review of the continents.  We created our own large map, colored it all in, and got ready to start on our Asian unit study.  Having spent all of my teen years in the Philippines, I'm really excited about this one!!!

Logan has continued plugging away on his Earlybird Math.  We're working on adding and subtracting right now.  I have not done a very good job of being creative with math over the past few months, but I hope to start supplementing with some games, books, and projects again soon.  Math is so much more fun that way!

He is also continuing on with his reading.  He does quite well with three-letter, short-vowel words, but gets overwhelmed quickly when we try to introduce anything new.  This week we are working on "ph" and "qu".  I've had him make some little flap books by drawing pictures and tracing words starting with ph and qu.  This seems to help cement the concepts and it is easy to pull them out and review the sounds before jumping into our reading for the day. 

I have Logan read to me for ten minutes each day.  We mix things up a bit by using Alpha Phonics, BOB books, and easy-to-read books from the library.  He loves that he can read books from the library shelves now!  It seems that this has encouraged him to try out his reading in other places as well.  I often find him trying to sound out words in his Lego magazines or on the backs of cereal boxes.

We generally finish out Logan's reading lessons with a page or two out of his Explode the Code workbook.  We are about three-fourths the way through book one.

Between math, reading, and a bit of fun geography/cultural stuff we manage to fill our "school-time" hour of the day.  The rest of the day is spent with our read-alouds (LOTS of these recently, since the kids always want me to read to them while I'm nursing.), playing outdoors, arts and crafts, dancing to whatever happens to be in the CD player, etc.  I'm convinced that the free hours of the day are when they learn the most.