I can hold on one more week!

I have decided to finish our "school year" next week. When I went to look up books for next weeks history lesson, I figured out we have only two chapters in our Story of the World book left. I think we will just do them both next week and then take a break for a bit. I say a break but that just means we will be doing a unit study or something during our mornings rather than history and science. I need to keep the morning schedule going through the summer just for continuity and my sanity. We will still do Math, but probably more fun math stuff. Language Arts will have to continue also since I can't say we have done that well at doing it regularly. And of course our Nature Study and such is always a pleasure and not a chore so that will continue. So nothing is really ending except maybe History and Science. But that is usually filled in with the unit study.

We are going to start with a unit study on horses. I will have to write out my plans in another post. It isn't that well planned out but I am sure my kids will enjoy it.

As for this week.......

We covered Shakespeare this week in History. My kid actually really loved reading some story book versions of his plays. They sat through Midsummer Nights Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and Macbeth. We didn't make it to Hamlet or The Tempest yet. But the books are here on the shelf so I will try to get to them in the next week. We listened to a few different children's audio book versions of his plays also which went over really well.

And we really liked the biography by Aliki the best. I have found my kids looking at this one a few times after we read through it. They also sat through the entire Magic Tree House book about Shakespeare. They didn't want me to stop in the middle so we read it in one sitting.
Just for fun I showed them the movie Kiss me Kate. It was a little beyond them but they enjoyed the singing and dancing, especially once the actual play started. When it was over. Ian was singing "brush up your shakespeare, start quoting him now". I was sort of surprised they enjoyed it so much. It is fun to read all these children's versions of the plays. I am starting to understand more about a few of these plays that were forced reading in High School. I am starting to think children's versions of Classic books are a great place to start when trying to get through a book that is "difficult". There is so much I missed when studying these books before.

Henry decided he couldn't be left out of school any more. He asked for his own math book last week so I broke down and bought him a few Kumon Workbooks (they were at Costco for a good price). He now has a book to do letters, numbers and cutting. He was so excited to have his own workbooks he brought them to me first thing Sunday Morning to do them and I had to tell him that they are for school on Monday. He didn't want to wait. He had to do some right then. He wanted to do page after page but I had to try to slow him down so he gets to do one cutting page a day and one lesson of each of the letters and numbers books each day. He often pulls them out and tries to do some on his own but I have to stop him or else he will just scribble through the whole book. We will see how this goes. But he is loving it!


Ian is doing great with his Explode the code books. He only does a page or two each day and is going very slowly through the lessons but he is sounding out the words a lot easier. His math is also coming along. He still needs me to help him with each problem since he can't read the directions but the actual arithmetic is easy for him. He does a page or two of his Math workbook each day as well.

Sophie is having no trouble with the Multiplication and Division that she is doing in her math. She just started to do multiplying multi-digit numbers and completely got the concept of having to multiply each of the place values by the number.

We actually did do a little science this week. We have pretty much covered all the planets over the last few weeks. Sophie can name them in order from the sun. Ian knows the names and Henry just loves to sit through the books. They keep insisting on keeping Pluto as the 9th planet even if it is now considered a dwarf planet. They included pluto when they made a mural this week. I broke out a poster board and construction paper. I went in search of a number of round items that we could use to trace different size circles. Ian and I traced the circles. Ian cut them out and then Sophie did all the gluing and labeling. I let her have free reign with the placement of the objects which, as usual, was hard for me. But this is what she came up with.

She loved it. Henry took a white crayon and added a few comets, stars, and a few orbits but they don't show up too much. He had fun anyway.

We did do a few language arts lessons with Sophie. This is still our weakest subject. We just have a hard time getting excited about it. It isn't fun and therefore doesn't get done. Every other subject seems to have games or books or activities that go along with it. Writing still just seems like busy work to Sophie. I am going to have to really think about this one so we can do a better about our grammar and writing.

We did attempt to do our outdoor hour challenge for the week which was humming birds. We bought a hummingbird feeder and filled it but have yet to see any hummingbirds. Even on our walks and bike rides we haven't seen any. The bottle brush bushes (a humming bird favorite) are blooming but still no sighting of any hummers. I think because the weather cooled off and is even raining now these little birds have gone into hiding. Maybe later in the Summer we will see some more. We did read the pages from Burgess Bird book for Children about the hummer. The kids always enjoy this book. But I couldn't really say we did the challenge since we didn't see them. But we were and still are on the look out. The kids are always checking the new feeder to see if the water level is any lower. And everyday it is just the same. We just wait.