Courageous Joy

School Daze

We got a late start on school today because I called my folks. Then we discovered that we were less than impressed with our library's selections on the Russian Revolution. I went ahead and purchased two books that I'd not ordered earlier. They'll hopefully be here tomorrow. The older three boys will double up on math and science today and tomorrow and then double up on history after that. This happens once or twice year where we didn't order a book because it was used for one week and the library had books on the same subject (or sometimes the library doesn't). I usually let the boys read the World Book article excerpts and Tapestry of Grace teacher notes when this happens. This time, they are more interested in the topic, and the book was "highly recommened", so I ordered it.

Arielle and Nolan had been working independently on table school, while I got the big boys going for the week.

I had them come work on their quilt squares from last week. They were excited. Arielle made a square on The Wright Brothers and Nolan chose to make one on the San Francisco Earthquake.

Arielle works on her square

newest squares began our second row...not sure how to tie it all LOL

For history (there are 3 more weeks of WWI) we'll cover the Titanic this week. I spent today reading to them about oceans, reveiwing continents and looking at some pictures of the great old ocean liners. We breifly skimmed through *Ghost Liners* - checking out the pictures - then and now. {G} I'll go online this afternoon and see if I can find some interactive sites with photos of the elegant liners. We read *The Seven Seas*. The illustrations in this book were awesome. The text left much to be desired. It was a good spring board for our review and I edited the text on the fly. . . the same ole' evolution stuff, theories presented as fact, global warming and "man is bad" themes.

For grammar we worked on collective nouns by reading Ruth Heller's *A Cache of Jewels*. Zander was even intriqued by the pictures and joined us. We also read some more tidbits about Texas from the *Roundup, a Texas number book*.

For math we read *Seaweed Soup*. We had checked this book out over the summer but it was worth another read. It teaches about matching sets. Zander joined us for this too. I suggested making some seaweed soup - an idea that was met with strong disapproval. We also played a math folder game I had made. I got the idea of this game from *File Folder Games for Math* from Scholastic. Amazon had it for $25 or so...I was relieved that Scholastic had it for $9 at the time I purchased it. Now that I've gotten my feet wet I'm seriously considering buying the "file folder game SET" that they sell or maybe just another book with reading games. Though Sing Spell, Read and Write has tons of great games for reinforcing phonics...I'm a bit bored after using the program for the past 9 years. I can't believe I've had a new reader for 9 years. LOL

Playing Nine in a Hive

We put Stacia down for a nap. I loaded Zander into the bike trailer, Arielle and Nolan got their helmets on and we took off for a bike ride. I needed to get at LEAST 30 minutes of riding in today.

Back at home, I corrected table work and then worked with Nolan on phonics. He's reviewing short vowel sounds...yes...we're about to leave Step 17 in Sing, Spell, Read and Write.

Josiah was at work when we watched Nicholas and Alexandra, so he watched that today.

Stacia woke up and it's time to start dinner and play with her. School's out.