School's in Session

It's time to hit the books and start school once again. This year we've had a few new 'starts', and lots of fun planned for the year....

Brianne will be hard at work trying to get the attention of her siblings to pay attention to her and play, play, play! She does a great job of it too. She can now crawl quite well and will wander from room to room in search for someone to interact with.

Liam's enjoying activities geared just for him. I will be doing a "letter of the week" approach to preschool for him this year. He loves to be included with the big kids activities too (when he can).

Delaney's goals this year are to better learn reading and writing skills.

I'll be using The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading and The Book of Mormon for reading skills. For math I'll use The Life of Fred. We are really enjoying the approach, a more story book fashioned, for this text.

For social studies we are using I Love America. For science Delaney want to learn about different animal, so she picks the animal and we get books and find items on line and learn about that animal. I use the Exploring Creation from Apologia as a spine to help with that.

Right now, for book group we are reading The Trumpet of the Swan soooo, we are learning about swans and other water fowl.

And to accomplish to goal developing better writing skills I'll have her do copy work, narrative or her own thoughts on each of the subjects we talk about in a journal.

She's also in a Classical Conversations Foundations group. Our first meeting with them was yesterday and she was sooo excited!! The anticipation almost consumed her. She was up and ready to go by 7am!

Cailin's got a fun filled busy year ahead of her. She's also in Foundations and will have much memory work to learn. History sentences are focus on American history. Science's memory work will be directed toward anatomy and physiology and chemistry (this week they are learning about all the tissues is our body--connective, epithelial, muscle and nerve) Latin is on different word translations and learning to say scripture from the book of John in Latin.

Then there is geography of the US, states, capitals and other features.

Timeline cards,the same as every year. Math and English grammar.

Her tutor, is amazing. She's going to have a great year.

English and writing, the Essentials class, will be different for her, there are so many more kids in the class, at the present time she doesn't like that, but she'll get use to it.

Here at home, she's using I Love America vol. 2 and reading many novels based on different eras of history. I'm requiring a project each month on her topic. September is all about the Native Americans.

For math, she too, is using Life of Fred--Fractions and Decimals. She's liking it much more than the curriculum we used last year....I dare say, she might even claim to like math now!

Science is Exploring Creation with Anatomy and Physiology.

She still busy editing her book she recently had published. Plus, she's energetically writing the 2nd book in her series.

Connor moved up to the Challenge program of Classical Conversations this year--he's now in Challenge A--and he's learned they call it 'Challenge' for a reason.

I think his biggest challenge is learning how to be better organized--time and stuff. This is very difficult for him, but he can do it.

He's very excited for Latin....real Latin, not just conjugating the word amo over and over.

He also tested to be in algebra...which he's very excited about. (He got to skip Saxon's pre algebra). His tutor here is very challenging--here's that word again :) --and he's loving all the thought provoking questions she has them ponder and think of. Ahh, to have another math and science minded person to converse with...he's in heaven!

Ryan's big move this year has been the addition of a college class at New River Community College. He's taking Pre Calculus. He's doing amazingly well!! He meets 3 times a week and each day, although he claims his head hurts from all the work, there is a big--no, huge--grin on his face when he comes out to meet us. We hope to slowly acclimate him to New River full time. Next semester it will be math, computers and maybe a history class.

For now, he's not continuing on with CC, but other studies will continue at home will be chemistry, American Literature, American history with Dad, and a few small online classes from BYU.

Book Group, History Group, CC, a fun video productions class that Cailin and Delaney will start in a few weeks, preschool, therapy for Ryan and Brianne, college....yep, we're busy! But what fun we'll have along the way too!