Need to make a few changes.

We are now a month into our "school year" and I really don't feel like we have hit our groove yet.  We are doing the most important things but not getting to a lot of the extra things that we usually try to cover. It isn't that it isn't planned. We just never seem to have time and energy to get to all the different subjects.

Music - Sophie got a recorder and a Teach yourself to play recorder book for her birthday and she is enjoying it. She always does better when she does it on her own so I thought this would be a good way to help her learn to read music. So far she has learned Mary had a little lamb and knows the notes and fingerings for that song. This is a vast improvement over the recorder blasts sounds that used to come out of the recorder. Now if we could just teach the boys to play and not just blow as hard as they can, it would make me very happy.

I would like to start doing a musician each month but haven't gotten it in yet. 

Art - I picked up a Draw Write Now book from the library booksale this week. The kids have all been drawing all sorts of Native Americans and pilgrims in their sketch books.

An artist for each month is also in the plan but I haven't been able to do it yet.

Latin - Hasn't even been cracked open

Spanish - Nada

Math - Sophie finished Singapore Math 4A and I think we are going to finally work through Life of Fred before moving to the 4B book.
Ian finished his 1B book and will start the next one soon.
Henry is working on reading and not math right now. But he sits in on Ian's lessons so I am sure he will fly through math once he finally decides to read and write.

History - We have read a number of Biographies about Abraham Lincoln. And listened to a story called Lamp of Freedom about a girl in Missouri and her family that helped with the Underground Railroad. We are going to continue with our study of the underground railroad and Abolitionists next week and then move into the Civil War. 

We have 3 more chapters of Minn of the Mississippi left. We have learned a lot about the geology and life of this river through this reading. We have followed Minn's progress down the river on the map so the kids are geting some Geography.

Science - No science this week. I think some of my problem is that we are doing stuff about air and water right now and since we just did Chemistry a lot of this stuff is review. My kids are kinda bored. I may jump ahead to the simple machines.  They really want to break out that Knex kit I bought.


Language Arts - Ian is starting Explode the code 3 1/2. He is reading really well now but I like that these workbooks give him some reading and writing practice so we are going to continue with them.
Henry is just starting ETC book 1. I am surprised at how well he is doing. Something is starting to click for him and he is reading some very simple words.
Sophie is working on her Book Report on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I haven't seen what her notes say yet but she seems to be doing it. I guess we will see when it comes to the actual writing process.

Devotional - We are reading the Book of Mormon each day and having good discussions about the Family Proclamation. My kids expect activities to go along with our Proclamation topic each day and this has been a challenge. There are some days we just sing a song or talk about stuff but we try to color or something to go along with it but I haven't been that creative this week.

Where I am running into the most trouble is that each of my kids require my attention. Ian looses his focus if I am not there watching him do his math and he likes to read the sentences in his Explode the Code aloud to me. Henry of course needs my help with his work. Sophie still needs one on one attention for Math as well. She gets easily distracted and it is hard to pull her back to do her work without a tantrum surfacing.  She just needs me to sit there and watch her work to keep her on task. It is taking up a lot of my time to do this.

I need to tweak our schedule a bit and see if we can get more stuff into our day. I have some ideas but we will have to see if they make a difference.