Journey to Excellence

Our curriculum has many cooking lessons, which I think are great! (Home Ec, Math and a History lesson all wrapped up into one recipe.) Dawson has made Fig and Date Bread and Honey Cake. They were both so good! But yesterday's recipe was for Lentil Stew. Knowing he would never eat stew, I searched for a Lentil Casserole recipe with great reviews. And, I found one. He diligently gathered the ingredients and made the casserole exactly as the recipe dictated. His first lesson in cutting onions! Before After We dished up our plates. And took a bite. I think my face says it all ... It went in ... And right back out ... Yuck!!!   Who actually eats that garbage??? We dumped the entire 9x13 pan of casserole down the drain. See how we still have the same amount on our plates? Glad I didn't have that casserole planned for dinner last night! We would have been making a quick trip to Taco Bell! Oh well, Lesson Learned!

Okay, I don't know how I got signed up for this! Maybe someone did it for me. Maybe I did it myself without remembering. But, for the past two months I have received complimentary materials from The History Channel. Last month was a newsletter with study guides on various upcoming History Channel topics. One of them is on a Greek God we will be studying in a few weeks. I was excited to receive it! Than today I got this .... A complimentary copy of the 3-dvd set of America: The Story of Us by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I looked at the site and it sells for $39.95! It's a 12-part series, which means a future 12-week study on the formation of America at our little school. I looked all over the website for any link to sign up for free materials like I am getting, to share with you, but I couldn't find anything! If you know how to do this, please let me know and I'll pass it along. These materials are fantastic! Thank you to whoever signed me up for them! ...

I am thinking ... That my mom should decrease the size of algebra problems. I am thankful ... That I get to do a lot of art projects. I am reading ... "The Guardians of Ga'hoole" I am hoping ... School goes by fast today, so I can go see my dad. (Written on Wednesday morning.) My favorite thing I did in school this week is ... Baked a honey cake. This week I learned ... That "Hatshepsut" had to marry her half brother in order to be Pharaoh. Something that has surprised me about homeschooling is ... It's a lot harder than I thought. {Read mom's perspective on Week 3 of homeschooling, and some greater details about what Dawson accomplished, here .} We are linked up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers .

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...

For Social Studies yesterday, Dawson was to make a Honey Cake from a recipe provided in our curriculum. It contains many of the ingredients that would have been available to Ancient Egyptians and the wealthy would have eaten this. He decided to dress the part and put on all white, and the chef's hat. He either looked like a chef or a prison inmate, I'm sure sure. But he said he needed to dress up to keep our fans entertained. He did this recipe all by himself, including the cream cheese orange frosting! He did a great job and it was really good! He didn't like the taste of it. I thought it was great! It has a spice cake type flavor to it, but it much thicker and heavier. The frosting is delicious and would be so good on an angel food cake! Here is the recipe: Honey Cake 3 1/2 c. flour, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. baking soda, 2 tsps. baking powder, 1 1/2 tsps. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg, 1/4 tsp. ground cloves, 1/8 tsp. ground ginger, 1/2 c. granulated sugar, 1/3 ...

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 ...

I've mentioned that there is a possibility that Dawson will return to public school at some point in the future. Even if he doesn't, he may decide to obtain a higher education after high school. Because of that I think it's very important to prepare Dawson for mainstream education, including how to take tests. But how do you give a test over material that you do not read? Our A World of Adventure curriculum includes a lot of outside reading on topics out of books we check out of the library. Many days he spends 15-30 minutes in Social Studies and/or Science reading additional materials. Our curriculum also does not have worksheets or written tests. I have been creating them on my own with a couple of online resources. {More on that later.} Again, how do you give a test over material that you do not read? My solution? .... 5 Facts . Every time Dawson reads outside materials, I have him write five facts from that material and put it in his spiral. For instance, he has been ...