Journey to Excellence

We added a new student . We did some rearranging in the school room. {That post is coming soon.} We had a another first day of school . To catch you up, we are now homeschooling an 8th grade boy, Dawson, and a 1st grade girl, Brynne. We have a sophomore girl, Kyndal, who goes to public school because that is what she wants. Without daily socialization, she would wither and die. And we have a 1st grade boy, Eli, who also still goes to public school. He has some special needs and sees a speech pathologist, occupational therapist and reading specialist. He also desperately needs the structure and socialization of the classroom (that he could not get at home to the same extent) and he needs to be pushed by a variety of educators and peers. We will bring him home someday, but right now he is a precious addition to his elementary school. Brynne This week we concentrated on getting Brynne (and me) used to her schooling at home. We had to prepare lessons for her on the fly, but came up...

Another busy , busy week! In addition to our homeschool schedule, I was also confronted with a situation with our youngest child who is in kindergarten in our public school. {There are many, many reasons why our other three children still attend public school, especially as it pertains to our younger two who are in 1st grade and kindergarten. I won't go into all of that now. Public school is what is best for them at this time, or we would have them home. We think it is likely that we will bring them home for school  when they are ready to go to middle school, but we will make that decision when the time comes.} Anyway, our youngest daughter is in kindergarten and has always been a go-getter . She is very smart and needs/wants lots and lots of stimulation, always has. She went to Preschool when she was 3 and Pre-K when she was 4. She is a young kindergartner, but was completely ready and willing to go. She was great for the first month. Then all of a sudden she started crying wh...

I have learned a lesson this week: When Dawson has a big project to do, that will be time consuming, I need to consider taking some things out of his curriculum so he has time to work on it. The rough draft of his Desert Book was due at the end of the day yesterday. But, on top of the other work he has had to do it's not going to end up being as well-thought-out and complete as I had envisioned. It's really my fault more than his because of my quest to get things done and checked off a list! And who has been the one stressed out? .... Me! Hopefully, I will remember this lesson in the future. What else did we get accomplished this week? A World of Adventure ~ Lots of subjects and predicates! We completed The Golden Goblet today. The story has been good, and it has provided us with tons of new vocabulary words. Dawson has been putting them on notecards, writing them into sentences and taking tests over them. We compared and contrasted two of the main characters of the bo...

Is it Thursday already?? Are we almost done with a full four weeks of school? Are we exactly two weeks away from finishing our first unit study? Has Dawson almost completed reading three novels? Is this day going to be the first day we have to cut some things out because of an emergency situation {sick pet}? Am I tired? Is Dawson? The answer to all of those questions is .... Yes! .. a resounding Yes! What a week! It seems that our week has been heavy with Language Arts, so much so that Dawson has been getting up at 7:00 a.m., starting school around 8:00 a.m. and not finishing Language Arts until at least lunch time. That's left us with Pre-Algebra, Social Studies, Science, Fine Arts, Typing (one day a week), Spanish (two days a week) and personal reading all to do after lunch!   We haven't finished school until at least 3:30 p.m. every day and Dawson has done his personal reading before bed. {He wants to know what happened to my assurance that we would be done with school b...

This has been an extremely busy week, but a short one as well. We were off Monday for Labor Day as my other three children were out of school those days. Then today and tomorrow we have taken off because Dawson and his older sister take these two days every year to spend at their dad's hometown fall festival. That only left two days of school this week. But, we accomplished much! A World of Adventure  ~ Our Bible lessons right now are centered around not worshiping other idols and beliefs about the afterlife. We made a living timeline across the top of our schoolroom with yarn and index cards. We are going to start charting dates (both Biblical and historical) on the timeline. It will be cool to see it progress throughout the year.  Our curriculum also has us reading The Golden Goblet . Dawson is doing vocabulary, grammar and writing lessons based on what we are reading in the book. Social Studies  ~ We will be continuing our study on Ancient Egypt for about tw...

This week had it's ups and downs. Monday was up. Tuesday was down. Wednesday was way up. Thursday was way down. Tomorrow we have a day planned that will keep us down, but make us feel up. A World of Adventure. Have I said how much I love this study? We finished up our reading in Genesis on the life of Joseph. We have now moved onto the warnings against worshiping idols. That fits in perfectly with our studies in Ancient Egypt because worshiping other gods is all they did! We have been digging deep into our study of Ancient Egypt and will continue to dig deeper. Language Arts. We started reading The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. With that book there are discussion questions each day, writing assignments and spelling and vocabulary words. The curriculum has actually taken a break from an actual spelling lesson, with us finishing up our ie/ei rules last week. But I decided to use the provided vocabulary words from each chapter of The Golden Goblet and have Dawson do spe...

What have we done this week? So much!!! We are continuing our studies of Ancient Egypt and the desert based on our reading in Genesis about the story of Joseph. Doing lots of art and projects is very important to Dawson. This week he made a tomb painting, using this idea from Samantha at To Be Busy at Home (thanks a million, Samantha, for the great idea!) His tomb painting depicts the things in his life that are important: his dog Crusoe, his girlfriend Tess (her picture is turned on it's side on the bottom), him riding his skateboard, and the symbol of "life". First he laid a piece of paper on the tile on our kitchen table and rubbed it with crayon to get a textured look. Next he free-handed pictures onto construction paper depicting things in his life that are important to him. Then he laid the cutouts under his textured paper and did crayon rubbings of them. He also finished his diorama of the desert and Nile river. It flooded and ran onto the banks. That's why the...