Easing In...

I've read about this approach, easing into the school year with a subject or two, and then adding in more week-by-week, but we've always been more of the "start with a bang" type.

This year though, we're easing in, naturally, and I think I like it! As you can read below, we've been quite busy. If we keep going like this, I would just need to add in math, language arts, and a little more reading!

This Week...

The Girl:

She watched all the episodes of Walking With Dinosaurs, Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, and Walking With Cavemen. She then asked me to print out dinosaur related coloring/information pages (most of which I got from Learning Page) so she could make a "book". We also started reading All About Dinosaurs (with The Boy listening in).

She also helped my mom make plum jam for a food drive this week, and learned a lot about canning. she's been helping cook nearly every dinner too, and, with her dad's coaching (since he's the "pro"), her knife skills are getting quite good!

She's been working, fairly steadily, on making a fairy house with craft sticks, twigs moss, and hot glue.

We finished The Garden Princess this week, and will be reading The Dragon in the Cliff next (about Mary Anning).

And finally, she wrote two stories this week, one is a continuation of her rabbit story, and the other was about a bee searching for a field of flowers. She also wrote my grocery list, and an intriguing version of this week's menu plan.

And of course she played with the guinea pigs...


The Boy:

As part of his ongoing fascination with older cars, he started watching My Classic Car this week, after being delighted to discover that our Amazon account offers us 12 seasons of the show! He has been researching Henry Ford here and there, along with other pioneers of the early automobile.

He's building a cabin, and complimentary outbuildings, with craft sticks and hot glue Right now, he's working on furniture to place in the cabin.

Leviathin is going well - he's really enjoying this book! I don't know if he'll go with the next book in the series, or The Hotel Under the Sand after this!

And photography and photo editing are still of great interest. He spends a lot of time working on getting
good angles, good light, and shots that will lend themselves to editing. He checked a couple of books on photography basics out from the library and is slowly working through them.



Together:

Through listening to Cheaper by the Dozen, the kids have gotten intrigued with learning foreign languages and Morse code. In the book, the father puts a victrola in each bathroom, along with stacks of French and German language records. Eventually, through listening to them while bathing, brushing teeth, etc., the kids start to pick up on the languages. Hmmm, I don't see buying a victrola for the bathroom per se, but perhaps we could use this approach in a more modern fashion! And Morse code would be fun.

We're going to put Harry Potter at bedtime on hold again, possibly, to read about King Arthur instead. We've been catching up on the show Merlin, and the kids thought it might be fun to compare a more original version of the story to this one. The same as they want to do for Dinotopia. I just have to decide which version of King Arthur to read! And we should actually start listening to The Peculiar, which is sitting in the car, waiting. Too much music and chatting going on for in-car stories lately! And now that we've finished (again) Downton Abbey, I think we'll try Bleak House, as it is set in an era we're all intrigued by!

We spent all yesterday afternoon swimming (sorry, no pictures because we were too busy hanging out in the water!), and today we're off to see a circus!

Have a good weekend!