Wrapping Up the Year...

I am finished with college until the fall, so since we follow my college calendar, the kids are done too! This somehow ended up being a light week anyhow. The plan is to take next week off entirely, then start back up with light summer schooling, taking off a few days here and there.

This week:

Language Arts
Cyrus worked on a few more assignments from Scott Foresmen, working on nouns and proper nouns. These have been a great stop-gap program, since we were fairly disorganized with writing after dropping Writing Tales. He also continued writing scripts for the animation program he's been playing around with. He finished The Last Olympian and has moved on to another series by the same author, starting with The Red Pyramid. Apparently this is an awesome book simply because the main character is homeschooled! (Not to mention all the cool Egyptian stuff!)

Cassia is continuing to work through lessons on ClickNKids Phonics. When she pays attention, she does very well. I also printed out all of the practice words and sentences (they have handy pdf files for this) and we continue to use her letter cards and a whiteboard to make and write the words. She also started reading from Nora Gaydos' series, Now I'm Reading. We got two entire sets of these at a fantastic price from a generous homeschool mom. And Cassia likes them.

Math
Ummm...

Science
We read more in George and the Secret Key to the Universe. This led to discussions on comets, mass and weight, and more. We also watched a couple more episodes of Meerkat Manor. And we discussed the recent destruction of a nearby empty lot, that has been leveled and stripped of all trees and bushes, and what it meant to the wildlife that had lived there for decades... birds, squirrels, foxes, and reptiles, maybe some rabbits. It only confirms our wish to someday move out to the country!

Social Studies/History
We had our Eating Around the World meeting this week, and the focus was on Greece. To get ready, we made Spanakopita (a Greek spinach & feta pie, only we made triangles), listened to Greek music, and watched Greece: Secrets of the Past. Next month we will be learning about China.

We also watched Whale Rider. This movie makes for great conversations on tradition. My kids both really enjoyed it, even more than I thought they would.

And Cassia has been watching Emily of New Moon, based on the books by L.M. Montgomery. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is about Emily, a young girl at the end of the 19th century, on an island off of Canada, who is orphaned and has to go live with her aunts. While the series departs from the books a good deal, it still is giving Cassia a good feeling for life at that time, in that place.

Other
We read more of Peter and the Starcatchers. We are really enjoying this book, and look forward to the next. We read a few short stories, including Mirabelle and the Ultra Violet Catastrophe; or, The Unexpected Walk with Great Uncle Magnus Pringle (one of my alltime favorite books from childhood! Today we are going to build fairy/gnome houses, our final 4H project for the year.

Then, on to summer schooling...
Cyrus will continue with piano lessons until mid July. We will resume in September. The reason for the break? His piano teacher is due to have a baby in late July. Cyrus will also continue with reading, mainly for pleasure, over the summer.

Cassia will continue to work through ClickNKids Phonics and the Now I'm Reading series. I want her to get to the point that she is ready to start McRuffy Phonics in the fall.

Both will play math and other games. I am selling my math textbook and calculator back to Amazon, in return for which I get store credit. I am looking at games like Pizza Fractions, Sum Swamp Addition and Subtraction, Head Full of Numbers, Totally Tut, a few related to archeology (not games so much as kits), and so forth. We also have owl pellets to dissect, field trips to take, and much, much more.

I am glad we're on break! It gives me a chance to re-approach schooling my kids in a different way. I read on message boards about families that start up with all the "basics" in the fall, and then add the fun stuff in. I am approaching it from the opposite angle... getting a firm grip on all the fun stuff over the summer, and then we'll add in math, writing, and so on in the fall.