Homeschool week 3

It's now two days after Christmas and I am just now getting to blogging about our week of school before vacation started.  It was actually hard to take a break after only having three weeks in!  

Since we've started homeschooling, I have been trying to wrap my mind around exactly what it is that makes me enjoy this so much.  There are many things that I could list that we both enjoy about having him home, but as I was putting the kids to bed one night last week I think I figured out exactly what it is that I LOVE about it.  

When I put my kids to bed at night we say our "good nights", pray, and give hugs and kisses.  It never fails that while putting them to bed, I have feelings of guilt and worry about not really getting a whole lot of time to spend with each of them individually.  I send them to bed realizing that I haven't really spent much time with them at all and feel badly about it.  I have felt this way for years, in fact, I can't really remember NOT feeling this way.  I just chalked it up to being "normal" and that every parent (especially parents to lots of kids) must feel this way.  I would tell myself that "I did my best" and move on.  

It wasn't until this experience with home schooling Luke when I realized that I didn't HAVE to feel that way!  As I put Jessalyn, Ethan and Owen to bed I realized that it was with that same feeling of wishing I could have done more with them and then kissed Luke and had this feeling of complete contentment about our day together.  It is such an amazing feeling...one that I've never really experienced before.  

I definitely see homeschooling in Owen's future.  I'm still trying to figure out the logistics of it all.  I honestly look back and wish that I'd done it this way with all of them! 

So..onto the recap of the week.  

Bible:  Luke has continued reading in his Bible and I have continued reading to him from Luke (NSV)...Luke 5-6:49.  He has also been learning about the Powhatan tribe (Pocahantas)  in the American Indian prayer guide.  He finished up the memorization of Psalm 8, although we will spend the next week refining it to make sure he really has it down!  

History/Geography:  He has done more reading about the early explorations from the Children's Encyclopedia of American History.  He is also focusing on many different tribes from all over America in the readings of the books "North American Indians" and "The Very First Americans".  Learning what the different tribes hunted, ate, built, wore etc.  

Reading:  Luke finished up the book "Walk The Worlds Rim".  This was the challenging book for him but in the end he finished up all the reading on his own (reading aloud to me).  It was a great story with a sad ending.   He also read 3 chapters of "Lawn Boy"...learning more about building a business and earning money!  This week was the start of a new book "Pocahontas and the Strangers".  He's really enjoying this one!

Handwriting:  He worked through lessons 11-15.

Spelling:  He went through lesson 3 and aced the test on Friday:)

Science:  We started learning about the Sun in science.  He had some fun practical exercises and visuals to help him understand.  We used a basketball compared to a peppercorn to get a visual of how much bigger the sun is compared to the moon.  He learned many fascinating facts about the sun.  We also used Luke, Josh and myself to mimic the earths rotation around the sun and the moon's rotation around the earth.  That's actually kind of tricky to do:)  He had to write a speech about why we should not look directly at the sun.  He needs to work on it a bit more before he can present it...we will work on that next week!  

Language Arts:  He learned about Similes and did a few exercises making up his own examples and then revising his story about the Christmas tree using similes.  He also worked on the dictation passage and wrote a letter to Mark and Cindy.  I honestly feel like he could use more in the way of language arts.  I'll be researching that in the near future.  

Math:  I realized that I didn't include math in last weeks update!  Rest assured..he IS doing math.  He's actually doing a LOT of math!  He is still doing an entire lesson per day.  Soon he will be caught up to the point of being challenged by the work and I won't expect him to get through as much in a day.  This math program uses "skip counting" as the base of all multiplication.  It seem to be a great way to memorize and I think it will be helpful when it comes to division and fractions and future math.  Its helpful to know the products first.  

He is learning which things that he can do independently and is quick to get started in the morning.  He can go straight to his handwriting book then read his Bible and also work on spelling without me.  He get's these things done very quickly each morning.  We seem to spend quite a bit of time with scripture memorization.  His language arts work is time consuming as well.  Most days we are done by 1:30 but there were a couple days when we were completely done before lunch!  I'm trying to remind Luke that it is not all about what time we finish in a day though, as he can get caught up in trying to finish quickly over doing his work well!  

I didn't take many pics during this week of school...but I do have a couple:)  

This is his Psalm 8 puzzle.  

Working on Math...in his bathrobe because it was "jamma day" for the other kids so we had jamma day too!

His spelling test.