This week has been another great one. I haven't been writing my reports as I should be. Things get crazy and I've been trying to limit internet time so as to spend my time more productively with the kids.R& S Bible with selected memory verses: Here is the verse we worked on. Our weekly memory verse and bible story have been a great hit this school year. The kids are asking to repeat the program next year. I'm looking into other options, but will keep their request in mind. :o)
CLE Math: Moving along smoothly. Olivia(9) is working on area and volume. Grace(5) is venturing out and doing math facts with three or more addends. The pride in her eyes as she masters them is awesome!ILL Language: We hit a road block this week in language with Olivia. She doesn't believe she is learning enough with ILL and wants to go back to Christian Light. This is another thing I am thinking on. I hate to make a decision hastily so I'm looking into it and taking my time with a decision. I liked CLE and felt it was very thorough. I also enjoy ILL for it's more relaxed and natural way of teaching. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
CLE's Learn to Read: Grace is doing terrific. She has memorized so many sight words and needs to sound out less words each day. I love her desire and willingness to learn!
Required and Free Reading: Both the girls have read numerous books from the library. This weeks were mostly from science. For fun Olivia read Lizzie Lies A Lot. She is in the middle of reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book. She likes to read them over and over selecting different options to make the ending change. Some of the content is questionable (ghosts) but I'm making an exception for these since I can see how much she enjoys them.
WTM Science: We studied the food chain and owls this week. Here are the owls with mice in their stomachs and grain in the mouse stomach. They were fun to make. We also studied frogs and toads. We added some paper frogs to our habitat we built last week(will post pic soon hopefully). Through National Geographic we found some great videos on them. It's been a good science week.
SOTW II History: We completed through chapter 8 this week. I am even reading some things about other religions that I hadn't learned before. We are still doing history as our night time read aloud. It works perfect this way. I have the kids' full attention and we can accomplish a few chapters a night.Our letter of the week for Hanna(3) was B. Here are our B Butterflies that the kids made.
And here is our work wall. We have the two on the left from Olivia. They are some drawings she made, one of an ocean scene we talked about last week and one of a fashion model. The two in the middle are Grace's. At church they made hand prints and blew paint on them to look like a burning bush. She is very proud of it. The bottom one of hers is a frog from science. The two on the right are Hanna's. They are cut and paste sheets she did. She loves scissors and glue!
So there is my weekly report. I hope to be more consistent again with these. I enjoy the accountability and also looking through them at the end of the year to see how our year went.I'll leave you with a couple of questions. Do you have any bible curriculum or study suggestions to do with multiple children (ages 10, 6, and 4)? How do you feel about language, do you prefer a gentle approach or one that is more rigid and thorough? Possibly a combination of the two?
7 comments:
I love the owls and the butterflies! We used to do a lot more hands-on projects, but somewhere we fell off that wagon. I kind of miss it! But I feel like a lot of my creativity has been missing lately. Thanks for the peek into your week.
Hey, I enjoyed reading your update this morning...glad things are going well! :)
We don't actually use a Bible curriculum. The kids are focusing a lot on scripture memory during their AWANA time...I'm SO glad we found that ministry...you can't get much more Bible-focused than that! :) So that's their scripture training for now...Our history lessons come from The Mystery of History which begins at the beginning and follows history, comparing Bible events with other world events on a timeline. So that's the Bible history side of it...As far as any other Bible training, we make sure and take the opportunity to point out Bible truths when discussing good and bad behavior, etc. For instance, instead of just saying "Mommy doesn't like it when you do that because...", we say, "what you have done is hurtful to Mommy and the Lord because His Word teaches us this...". The kids were pretty interested the other day to learn that the Bible teaches that if you honor your parents, you'll have a long life. Of course, they had to go off forever about the other side of that so I had to assure them that just because they got in trouble today didn't mean that they were going to die in their sleep tonight!! :) I've tried to stay away from actually teaching the Bible as a "school" lesson or in a curriculum-type format because I want them to see that it is something we look to for guidance at all times---not just during "school time"---and I want their relationships with the Lord to be an all-day sort of thing...so we work it into all day every day sort of stuff, rather than taking a specific time each day to do a lesson---know what I mean?
As far as a literature approach, I would prefer a more relaxed approach...and we are working into that. Right now, Lynzie is the only one who can just pick up anything and read it...she has been reading through the Narnia series, as well as all the Wizard of Oz sequels...she can pretty much read at any level so I think this approach works best with her right now. I am still doing phonics pretty heavily with the other boys and establishing a solid foundation for later reading. I think that once I have a few who can be like Lynzie and pick up pretty much anything to read, that our approach will relax a lot and I'll probably focus more on writing skills than word building skills. I firmly believe, and Lynzie and Michael (and myself, actually) have proven, that a kid will usually learn a lot more from actual reading of the language than from all the workbooks you could throw at them. I don't make too big of a deal when Lynzie misses a couple words on her spelling test or gets her "d's" backwards...I know that she will eventually figure those things out as she becomes familiar with the English language in her daily reading. Right now, I require at least a half hour (though she usually takes a couple hours) per day of free reading time for her. She picks at least 2 chapter books per month to read and report on...then she earns a pizza certificate (though here in a few weeks after baby, I'm going raw again so we might have to change that up... :) Choosing just 2 to focus on frees up the rest of her month for incorporating in whatever else she decides to read at the moment. One thing that really bugs me though is when she has like 6 books going at once...but I guess I did that as a kid too and did fine...I don't know if I could keep track of that many now---unless all of them were nonfiction on various subjects. :)
Boy, I've written a novel today...guess your post got me thinking...that or it's because the kids are still in bed and I can actually finish a thought! :)
Have a great day, Lindsey :)
~Sarah
After reading through that, I want to clarify what I said in the first paragraph about teaching the Bible "as we go" instead of in a curriculum format. I do understand that all of us parents are in different stages of our walk with the Lord. Teaching the Bible and it's truths this way requires a parent to be in a solid and somewhat maturing relationship with the Lord and to have some level of familiarity with the Bible. There are definitely families who are just starting out in a Christian walk and therefore, the parents of those families may not have the ability to immediately recognize the sorts of opportunities I mentioned in their daily interactions with their kids. In that case, I am so thankful for the many Bible curricula that are out there! What a great way to learn as a family on all different levels of maturity. One thing I did when Lynzie was really little and I was a new Christian was to go to the Bible bookstore and find books that Sunday school teachers would use for lessons. For instance, I have one on teaching kids to pray. It has lots of crafts and hands-on lessons promoting prayer in the home, for others and in certain places (like nursing homes...). It was so much less expensive than a full-blown curriculum and was all reproducible so it could be used over and over. In fact, if you wanna borrow it, you are welcome to it! :) I think I paid like $10 for it.
Thinking back on it, I think the very best thing I did to learn basic Bible stuff was to teach at the Christian school for the first two years of our marriage. I was brand new to a committed relationship with God and reading those simple Bible stories from an established curriculum each day taught me SO much!
A resource that I would recommend for parents to learn more about the Bible is Kay Arthurs Inductive Studies series. She takes a book of the Bible and has you go through it over and over again over the course of several weeks...pointing out new truths to look for each week. I like her stuff because it doesn't "give you the answers" but has you find out what God would speak to you wherever you're at and with the interpretation that he wants you to get (not the Kay Arthur interpretation...). I've gone through the Galatians one so far and could probably quote you the whole book! Well, not really, but if you through a Bible quote at me, I could definitely tell you whether or not it was there...I've been through that book COUNTLESS times in the last few weeks! :)
Anyway, I said all that just to point out that the Bible teaches us to train our children in God's ways all the time...there's a place in Deuteronomy where he talks about training them as you walk from place to place, as you lie down, as you rise..etc. However, if a parent is just beginning a relationship with the Lord, that can sometimes be tricky as that parent may not know where to start or, as I said, recognize the opportunities. Everyone must start somewhere and that's where a great curriculum can come in to get the ball rolling. Other than the suggestions I made above, I've really never used any other established curriculum than the one I used to teach at the Christian school. That was ACE School of Tomorrow PACES...and while it was a great thing, the same stuff can be found for so much cheaper. (Plus it was a little outdated...not making room for the unfortunate fact that there's a such thing as split families, single parents, etc....kinda rough for kids from a divorced background, etc.)
Oh, I just had another thought! :) (Hope your comments page has an empty tummy today... :) One thing a parent could do for a simple and effective curriculum would be to ask their kids' Sunday School teachers for extra, unused handouts or for the lesson plans after they finish a unit. I'm not sure about other churches, but I know in our church in Baker, they'd get new curriculum every quarter and the old stuff would just get tossed. Now that I think about it, I remember gathering the leftovers to use with Lynzie...wish I would have kept some of that! ;)
Ok, really, I gotta stop talking now! But hey, keep the great questions coming...you're providing food for thought! ;)
ME
ok, one more comment...please read in paragraph 3 "threw a Bible quote" not "through"...
Grammar robot shutting down now.
Well, now that Sarah has filled the comments section tummy, I'll see if I can fit some more in! LOL!
The kids memorize a verse each week for Sunday School. But it seems they just forget it after they learn it so I may try a Bible memorization system on Penny Gardner's site (pennygardner.com) where the child makes a card for each verse and then it's filed in a recipe box under daily, weekly, monthly, yearly review sections. I haven't set it up yet. Hans could copy the verse for his copy work (Monday) on the card and then have it for review. We read the bible each night as part of our reading time before bed. Hans reads to Brett the "real" bible following Penny Gardner's reading plan but I'm not sure I totally like that- I need to see what Brett thinks about it before I whole heartedly recommend that. We can talk about it later if you want. I feel between Sunday School and the other reading, memorization and general talking about it that it's enough. Kirsten will often beat the S.S. teacher in telling the story. Last week she kindly let the teacher tell the story. AWANA is great too, from what I hear. I know where you can find it in town too. ;-)
You do so many fun things! I need to drop my kids off so they can get more crafts, etc. LOL! Not that Hans would like that but maybe he would if your oldest was involved.
I am just getting started on teaching Kirsten to read. Talia seems more ready than Kirsten still! But I need to consistently work on it and see if we make progress.
Keep up the good work! I missed seeing you this week and I look forward to Tuesday.
I like the sounds of AWANA but am concerned about having another weekly commitment. And Sarah you offered much food for thought. We don't do worksheets or anything with our bible time. We prefer to read from good books and then have questions to reflect on it. I've had a hard time coming up with another similar to what we have now. They do like to color pictures while reading the stories though.
Owl studies are so much fun. We actually got owl puke and tore it apart. Discovered all interesting types of bones. Have a good week.
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