Journey to Excellence

 If you have read my Weekly Wrap-ups for the past nine weeks, you have probably seen a trend of cramming a lot into one week! This week, however, I have noticed myself being much more laid back in the area of schoolwork. I am pretty certain it has had something to do with my newfound interest in the Charlotte Mason method. But, on top of that I have seen that with two children at home, learning two completely different sets of things (being 9 years apart in age), I am quickly overloading myself! This past Fall Break was a great one for me. It gave me some downtime and some time to reflect on the past quarter. I realized that I was beginning to pause much more frequently to notice the education that was occurring all day long, without the aid of any school books ... the aha moments ... the learning from doing things they had interest in ... the application of things learned in books to real life! I would stop myself from hurrying Brynne along to go upstairs to resume workbo...

I've decided to abandon the "Dawson Says" posts because he really doesn't have much to say every week and it's a struggle to get him to do it with a positive attitude {and I doubt anybody wants to hear attitude from a kid at the end of their own long week of, possibly, having attitudes of their own at home to deal with.} Soooooo ..... here's this teacher's viewpoint of our week: Brynne ~ 1st Grade The 3 R's ~ R eading, w R iting and a R ithmetic Brynne started her weekly journal pages by finishing the sentence, "I don't like to eat ... Mostar." Can you guess what that is? Hint .. she drew a yellow bottle, upside down. When you look at the picture straight on it has a capital "W" on it. (It's Mustard and, cleverly, the "W" is really an "M" since the bottle is upside down.) Every day we got out the workboxes and completed workbook pages having to do with ABC dot-to-dots, sequencing, alike vs. different...

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...

We didn't get our Sketch Tuesday projects done until Friday last week, and I had already posted our weekly summary. This week's topic was to draw something that grows on trees. Here is Dawson's entry ... Here is my entry ...