September is Busy!

Is it just me or has life just started going in fast forward. Once September hit we have been non stop busy. We just seem to have something going on each day of the week and new things are always cropping up. We have had doctor, ENT, and Orthodontist visits. Two birthdays to celebrate. A baptism/blessing day to plan and carry out. Sophie just started going to weekly activities for church as well as her cooking class. Ian has his Karate class. Henry's Soccer hasn't even started yet but we still feel like we are always on the go. Somehow we still fit in school work and Molly does get fed and does sleep every once in awhile in her bed rather than her car seat. It isn't very often, I admit. She isn't on a set schedule yet because each day is different. I just take her along and hope she does well where ever we are.

I can't say we are doing a heavy school load either. I hit all the major subjects but in a much more relaxed way.

History : We have been doing one chapter a week in our Story of the World book and reading a few go alongs, But other than the map work and the coloring page we haven't done any fun projects. We have taken a little more time to study Holland or the Netherlands. We have been looking at painting by Rembrandt and reading The Wheel on the School as a read aloud. Sophie wrote a little report about storks to go along with this book. Hans Brinker and the silver skates has been our audio book in the car for the last week as well. So we are getting a good look at Holland. Even if our chapter for the week was about King James I and the Jamestown settlement.

Science : Chemistry has been a lot of fun. We do 2 experiments a week along with our reading. The Noeo science curriculum we are following has been a lot of fun but goes a bit slow for us. So we have ended up doing about two weeks worth of work each week so far. My kids want to read the entire book usually rather than just a few pages of it like the schedule tells us. So we are moving quickly through it.

Poetry/Penmanship ; Sophie has been practicing her cursive writing while copying out a few of her favorite Lewis Carroll poems. I gave her a poetry book of his poems for her birthday and she has really enjoyed it.

Reading : Ian has almost completed the first Explode the Code book. He also reads one passage from the McGuffey Reader to me. He knows all the sounds of the letters he just can't seem to master combining the sounds to make a word yet. He can do it but very slowly. I think I need to start Henry on the Explode the code primers.

Math : Singapore Math is working well. Sophie is almost done with the 3A book. Ian is still working on the 1A book but because he can't read yet we are taking it very slow. Our focus is really on reading with him at the moment. I did something new with Sophie recently. When she finished a review we took the next day off of the workbook and we read a biography of a mathematician from Mathematicians are people Too. We only have done one so far and Sophie seemed to enjoy it. She didn't even complain when I asked her to write out a narration on the man.

Latin : I am surprised my kids are taking to Latin so easily. Not that we are really doing any kind of intense study. We get a new word just about everyday and we look at some sentences made the different words we have studied thus far and try to translate them. 10 min a day at the most but so far so good.

I am still falling short on language arts with Sophie but she has been doing a lot of writing with science, history and even with latin and math so it is hard to get her to do much more than this. I guess incorporating it into the other subjects works for now.

Well... I need to head out to yet another activity.

I will try to post more often if I can squeeze in a moment to do so.