What a pleasure the last three weeks have been! I'm going to quit wondering why and just enjoy the easy, lid-back routine we've gotten into this year. I hope it lasts...we'll enjoy it while it does.
This week, having finished up the introduction chapter last week, we began our Latin lessons in earnest. This will be a challenging subject, but both of the big kids are really excited about it. We hope to finish up two full years before Embree gets into her high school work. Then, she'll be able to choose from Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, or Romanian...or more than one! The goal is to have enough Latin under her belt to make the study of any Romance language more enjoyable and productive.
We are doing quite a bit of writing in History; learning to summarize in a more efficient manner and to construct the types of paragraphs that will ultimately lead to essays and research papers.
Embree is part of a theatrical repertory company for middle and high schoolers this year. She began rehearsals for that this week. She'll be playing Andromache in a combined version of The Iliad and The Aeneid. She resumed guitar lessons this week and will be practicing "Soul Sister" by train and "She Loves You" by the Beatles. She also started a yoga class that she really enjoys. It's going to be a busy year for her!
We'll be celebrating Reeves' 9th birthday this week. He's having a cookout with friends to play flag football and eat hot dogs (nonvegetarian hot dogs for the birthday boy!). He and a friend are attending their first meeting of the Lego club at the library. I hope he'll enjoy it. Legos are still his favorite activity aside from screen time. We ordered the first part of the Lego Master Builder's series for him for school. He still swears he'll be a Lego designer some day. I see a trip to Legoland in FL in our future!
Brice continues to love dinosaurs and trains. He has spent many hours this week constructing intricate rail and station systems in his room. He's enjoying a preschool workbook all about dinosaurs and he's learning his ABCs. I often hear making up his own songs about letters and their sounds while he's playing.
This week I thought I'd share some links that I love or have found useful in our studies.
Hope you'll be able to use some of them as well.
Here's the Lego Master Builders Academy site I mentioned above.
We recently subscribed to the blog The Kid Should See This. Nearly every day there's been a short video that amazed us or sparked some meaningful conversation. Check it out!
Every week, we take a break from serious writing to explore some fun topics. We have found so many good - free - ideas at Education.com.
Another blog I have found extremely useful of late is Freely Educate. There are several sites that offer free curriculum, but this site seems to offer more than the usual sites of old litereature in the public domain. I have found some valuable resources that we actually are using every day.
Finally, have you ever heard of Evernote? It's available on you pc as well as in an app form for iPod and iPhone. I read lots of blogs and pull lots of curricular ideas from online. Evernote is a greatplace to store and organize these ideas...much better than trying to bookmark and review random sites. My understanding is that you can make notes and store docuemnt in Evernote as well. And it's free. I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to easily find a recipe or idea asavedfor a certain topic in school. Love it!
Hope you have a lovely last hurrah if summer weekend! Todd is actually off all weekend for a change, so we are hideing out, doing family stuff and loving having him home with us!!
Have a great week! Namaste.
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