Monday, May 17, 2010

Day #134/175 Days

I began something new today. Here is how our day went....

8am - School with Happy & Miss H
I decided to try Five in a Row. We're "rowing" The Story About Ping. It's interesting as I'm doing this with an almost three year old and a 6-1/2 year old but it seems to be working.

We put together the fronts of our notebooks. I found lapbooking elements for all the Five in a Row books over at Homeschool Share and I am adapting them for use with the kids.

Miss H is on the left & Happy's on the right.
I photocopied the cover of the book and had them add a colored picture to it as well.

We discussed geography and talked about the Yangtzhe River today. I had them color a small graphic for the flag of China and let them watch some videos on YouTube about ducks and birds used for fishing in China. We watched Elmo's Ducks and and Five Little Ducks plus birds fishing (just like it was mentioned in the book). 

Here is a photo of the first page in their notebook:

Miss H's elements are open and Happy's are closed. 

They both seem to really be liking this so I plan to continue and see how it goes. Homeschool Share makes it super easy to do this. 

About 9am - Together School
  • Popcorn Prayer
  • Pledge of Allegience
  • America the Beautiful
  • Poem - almost got it - maybe one more week
  • Read Aloud
  • Matthew Chapter 23
  • Family Walk - "Mercy"
  • Hymn Study (to go along with FIAR) "Trust and Obey"
  • History reading
About 10:30am - Train Unit study with Conductor
~As Conductor has grown, so has his love of trains. Some little boys like them when they are little. They love Thomas the Tank Engine and as they grow, that love moves on to other things. Not Conductor. He lives, eats, and breathes trains. He has read through encyclopedias of trains that we have numerous times. He just loves them. I had bought an Amanda Bennett Unit Study on Trains last fall so I pulled that out to do with him. I think he really likes the one-on-one time with Mom. We sit at the table since we need the computer for most of it.

Each day has copywork and "WOW" words (Words of Wisdom) plus "Interesting People & Places" followed by "Read and Discover." The study came with notebooking pages as well so I printed off some and Conductor happily began writing out his copywork - yup, happily.

Then we moved on to the WOW words. Each word needs to be looked up in a dictionary and the definition written out. While there were some links to dictionaries on line - including the Websters 1828 one - I chose to have him use a regular book and used the time to teach him how to use it. He is doing fine with this as well. This is the only writing I ask of him - the copywork and the WOW words. I let him dictate the rest to me and I write it.

His "interesting person" today was James Watt so we created this page for his notebook:


I didn't have any special project lined up yet for Lego-Man but I will have that in place for tomorrow. The kids seem to be enjoying this way of schooling for now and so do I. We'll continue this until our special projects are done. And then re-evaluate.

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