Year 2, Week 3

Today we are wrapping up our third week of our second year of homeschooling, and I wanted to reflect on how it is going so far.  If I keep a record here, I can notice patterns and hopefully improve each year.

I changed up some of the curriculum and altered my approach to a few subjects.  I kept the elements of last year that were working well for us, and the new elements seem to be integrating well into our daily routine.    MCT Language Arts is such a better fit for us than First Language Lessons.  I love the Well Trained Mind approach to learning, but the Language Lessons didn't fit for us.  They were too slow moving and repetitive to capture the attention of two active boys.  MCT moves much more quickly and the layout and graphic design of the books are much more engaging for the kids.   The poetry component is superb.  I wish I had been exposed to poetry in this manner as a child.

 Last year, I used a huge stack of library books for my science curriculum, and that worked well for our study of earth science and astronomy.  There is a dearth of elementary level resources for Chemistry, so I chose an actual early elementary Chemistry text book for this year, along with a few other books and resources that I found at Barnes & Noble.  The kids are enjoying Chemistry thus far, although we haven't started the text book, yet.  We've been reading about states of matter and what elements are in a book called Chemistry:  Getting a Big Reaction.  This is a short and colorful book, which also appeals visually to the boys.

Math U See is still working well.  We've mastered multiplication by 0, 1, 2 and 10 in the first three weeks of school this year.  I'm sure it's going to get a little harder as we move on to the "not so easy" factors.

Cursive handwriting is going better than I expected.  We've learned lower case a, d, c, q and g so far.  The boys resist writing so much that I thought this would be a challenge, but I'm letting them use whiteboards when initially learning the letters and it seems to be working much better than learning to write them on paper.

We are on our third year of Story of the World.  Luckily, we were introduced to it by Aunt Amy before we even started homeschooling, so we are ahead of the game in history.  I recommend Story of the World for adults who don't feel that they have a good basic knowledge of world history.  We listen to the audiobook version read by Jim Weiss.  I also love the activities, maps, and further reading suggestions provided in the Activity Guide.

I'm ramping up Music this year, doing 2 days a week as opposed to 1.  We are getting a little more music theory and a little more practice playing the recorder.

I've signed them up for Homeschool Swim & Gym at Cleveland State, and the first class went surprisingly well.  The CSU students and staff who run the program are well organized and the kids learned skills while having fun.

We've done 2 lessons in Artistic Pursuits, and I think they like the program.  I just have to face the fact that my kids are not the "artist types".  They like to draw if it has to do with illustrating their comic books, but they are still mostly doing stick figures.  This book is making them think, though, and I can already see an improvement.

We are doing Health once a week, using a preset curriculum I purchased last year.  We've been focusing on how germs spread for these first few weeks.  I've tried to do an experiment where you touch things around the house and then touch a piece of bread, which you moisten and put in a dark place.  Then you wash you hands and repeat with the bread.  I guess my house must be too clean ;)  because we've done this now with two different kinds of bread (organic, even!) and nothing is growing on our bread.

We are still doing Chess once a week, using the Championship Chess materials, but it's getting beyond me now.  If we can ever afford it, I think I'll send them to Progress with Chess classes.

French is still not going that well.  E is more enthusiastic about it than A, but neither one really wants to learn  it.  Poor things!  But we are getting a lot of Latin roots in our MCT program, so that should start helping with the French vocab.  We're reading a book about Mary Queen of Scots for history, and it takes place in France when she was a young girl.  It is set at many of the chateaux that I visited when I lived in Tours, so I keep getting excited and showing them pictures.  They want to visit these places, especially Chambord, so that might be an incentive to keep up the French lessons.

We still do recitations in the morning.  They repeat all the Latin words and phrases they have learned, the poems they have memorized, and their science vocabulary every morning.  This really helps things stick in their minds.

So far, the best part about this year has been the enthusiasm and good attitudes of the boys.  They were excited to get started again after our summer break, and the excitement hasn't worn off, yet.  They both really like homeschooling and don't want to go back to public school.  That may change in the future, but for now, I'm enjoying spending this time with them and watching them learn and grow.