This week is our first week back to our study schedule and instead of just posting my plans I thought I would post how each day went, introducing our resources and plans along the way.
Family Devotions
We start our day at 8.00 with Family Devotions. At the moment we are Reading through Ephesians. We read a portion each day, talk about it and pray together.
Since today was our first day back we spent a little time catching up with our new routine and setting up control journals. (More on control journals later in the week as we test them out.)
Character Studies
We are studying character back together as a whole family this year. The older children have been doing it on their own and though they have learnt plenty it had become an academic subject to them rather than a discipleship, life changing subject. Today we started Sensitivity. (We had a big laundry to do today so we all helped hang out a few loads instead of doing any notebook work with Sensitivity.)
Workshops:
On Monday I have 2 hours of interactive teaching / learning with Jess, Nomi and Daniel. These are subjects that are easy to get squeezed out of our plans, and yet bring a level of interaction and co-operative learning which is good.
On Saturday the local homeschool co-op has their yearly concert it has been a tradition to start the years activities with a family concert on Saturday afternoon / night so Dads can come along. It is a highlight. So today we went searching for something to do as a family. We had a ball as we read some really stupid skits (my family are not allowed to use the word stupid but this was honestly the name of the website!!). We laughed so hard we cried! We eventually came up with a few items that we will give a go. Cant tell more just now maybe next week!
We would usually move onto Auslan (sign language) next but we decided, since we only have a week to get the concert organised, to spend that time working on the scripts. The girls worked on that together. This year they will be doing more and more together it is good to see their relationship growing and enjoying doing things together. It usually ends up in a giggle!! Meanwhile Daniel and I did his LEM Phonics together. He read 4 pages from his reader really smoothly with about 1 word a page he needed guidance with.
More washing to hang.
Living math – We are reading The Great Number Rumble. Today we read about the math in music. To do a little hands on they cut up a piece of music and rolling the dice to select which note to chose, piecing it back together again in a random order. Apparently this has been done before in the history of music-making. Jessica played the original and then played the new piece for the others. They really enjoyed this activity. Mathematically we were really working with chance / probability – I will continue with this topic over the next week with Daniel one on one.
We then squeezed in ½ hour of reading the Australia Book as we being our Australian Book Traveller unit before lunch. That was disappointing that we only got ½ hour. But Ill read more maybe over lunch tomorrow.
After lunch the kids maintained a focused routine with subjects such as math, music, reading and writing.
I am already seeing a glitch in my scheduling it is too tight I am squeezing too much in. What to do? Oh well, this week is about seeing how it goes, taking notes and making changes at the end of the week so we can give it a shot again next week!
