Tag: Weekly Review

We had a couple of strange weeks.

We had made plans for the girls to stay with their grandparents for the week, then a stomach virus hit. We postponed the plans by a couple of days and spent the early part of the week getting well and celebrating someone turning 7 years old! We didn’t do any schooling for the younger two, but Rose desperately wanted to work on her history before she left. So we did the entire weeks worth of history in one afternoon…by her choice! We didn’t do any other work, so here are some highlights from her history activities.

And we also had some fun!

We tried some homemade bubbles with this recipe:

2 quarts water
1/3 cup dish liquid
1/3 cup corn starch
1 tsp baking powder

They were a hit!

Little Hands to Heaven – Unit 2
Grace thoroughly enjoyed the Finger Play and poem this week. That will probably be her favorite part all year! I’ve started having her draw pictures while we listen to the song and she made a beautiful rainbow picture too!

Little Hearts for His Glory – Unit 3
My sweet Beth was camera shy this week, so no pictures! She did have a great time with this unit, although she was disappointed there wasn’t more reading from her history book! She giggled at me when we “Praised Him when you stand up, and when you’re sitting down” because she thought I looked funny getting up and down. I guess I’m getting old!

She is FLYING through her math workbook even with the manipulatives and activities. I’m not slowing her down, just enjoying how much she is enjoying math! She also has latched on to an old Dick and Jane 1st grade reader she can’t seem to get enough of! It was given to us by her great-grandmother so it is very special and she thinks it’s the best book ever right now!

Bigger Hearts for His Glory – Unit 2 (Week 2)

It made Rose so happy to do science this week! I’m going to admit I was a bit of a slacker last year in Beyond. She attends a two-day-a-week class that focuses on humanities and science so I just let it slide. Alternating science and history this year makes it much easier! She was so excited that both of her experiment predictions were correct!

She is quite the artist and does very good at the drawing in her notebook. The only problem is when she gets frustrated that it isn’t perfect like in the book. This is a constant battle with us so we’re working through it together!

Our third week of school went really well! I’m now running three separate guides, but lots of planning ahead has made this week run so smooth! If you are interested in seeing our schedule you can check it out here.

Little Hands to Heaven – Unit 1
Grace has been begging me to, “do lessons,” since last January. I had lots of manipulative activities for her, but it just wasn’t enough in her mind! So we decided to begin Little Hands to Heaven with her this year. We also added in Rod and Staff workbooks called About 3. She was so excited to begin her own work this week! She acted so very grown up.

Little Hearts for His Glory – Unit 2
We moved on to unit 2 in Little Hearts for His Glory with Beth. She was a little disappointed that we weren’t going to sing the continents song, but still enjoyed our rhyme called All Because of Sin. Her favorite parts of the day are math and reading. She has fallen in love with the Dick and Jane book her great-grandmother gave her.

Bigger Hearts for His Glory – Unit 2 (Week 1)
Since we have decided to use this guide at half speed we are on a history week. Rose is really getting into her notebooking activities. I wasn’t sure if she would enjoy it, but she likes anything she can draw. She’s also once again creating a timeline she will add to weekly.

One new piece of curriculum we have added is a weekly writing assignment. She is learning how to build a paragraph and types it on Fridays. She is enjoying this and is especially enjoying being able to type on the computer!

This was our 2nd week with Bigger at half speed and 1st week with Little Hearts at full speed. The only hitch was my 2 1/2 year-old daughter complaining about not having work. We’re starting Little Hands to Heaven next week for her 🙂

Bigger Hearts for His Glory – Unit 1 (Part 2)
Rose is in Bigger Hearts for His Glory and she LOVED the science notebooking and experiments. She also is doing quite well at narration after only 2 weeks. She will turn 7 in 2 weeks and since narration is new to me I wasn’t sure what to expect. She is doing lovely!

Little Hearts for His Glory – Unit 1
Beth, in Little Hearts for His Glory, is quite taken with the continents song! She taught it to her little sister and they went around singing it all week. I incorporated a map and pointed to the continents. She now knows them very well! She also loved memorizing the Bible verse and quoted it ALL DAY LONG to anyone who would listen…even strangers at the store!

It was a fabulous week and I’m glad things are starting out well. I know we’ll have some not as exciting days and weeks along the way so it will be nice to remember how well we started!

I didn’t plan to start school this week…but my daughter talked me into it. How can I turn her down when she loves learning and begs me daily to start lessons back? In hindsight I probably should have waited another week because this week was Bible School every evening at our church. Even with that the week went off with only a few hitches!

We are working through her guide, Bigger Hearts for His Glory, at half speed for a few reasons. There is a big skill-level jump between this guide and Beyond Hearts for His Glory which she completed earlier this year. She’s learning how to look up and define words using a dictionary, recording scientific hypothesis then evaluating that hypothesis, analyzing literary elements, and learning to write more formally.

The second reason is she will once again be taking a two-day-a-week class at Deerstream Learning Center. The environment at Deerstream is everything I want for her. She will be studying humanities and science. I am also blessed to be teaching at Deerstream again for a third year.

Bigger Hearts for His Glory – Unit 1 (Part 1)
I let the girls sleep as late as they wanted since everyone was up past their bedtimes and running around getting thoroughly exhausted. She has been working on math daily because she was asking to, but adding in all the other work, including new skill levels, tired her out quickly.

We will be alternating history and Bible with Science and Poetry weekly. This week was our first week of history. She enjoyed the stories about early explorers and especially the little tidbits which helped her to think about them as human.

Memorization is one of her strongest areas so she challenges herself to memorize the Scripture verse in one day. The verses this year are longer, causing her to be stretched more, but she still memorized it in one day!

The best part of the week was when I questioned her about how she felt about math. Last year math was a struggle. The curriculum we used was more abstract than concrete and she often did not understand the concepts we were learning. Insecure is the best way to describe how she felt. That sent me on a search for a new curriculum. We landed on the very traditional and solid Rod and Staff math. It is straight forward, builds on itself quietly, and left my girl feeling confident about her math skills to the point that she is begging to go ahead in her book. I asked her why she liked this better. She said, “Because I know I can do it.”