Homeschool notetaking...

In an effort to better document our schooling-- for family history purposes and to track what we have done so at the end of the year we can see the progress we have made-- I am going to (try) to add a post every week about each of the kids, what they have accomplished and the daily routines that we do. (Okay, okay, I know me, in all likely hood, this will only be a monthly occurrence ;)
For most of you this will be quite boring. I could start a new blog devoted just to homeschooling, but, I have grand ambitions to print our blog into a hard copy type book as our family history and I want it all-our family fun and school learning fun under one cover. (This will probably be heavy on information about Ryan and Connor, because they don't do "project" type work with me anymore...so I want to remember what they did in the future and will write it down here.)

I may often document the daily tasks that each accomplish, so to the readers of this blog, I apologize if they are boring. You may wish to ignore these posts and just look at the few pictures that will be sprinkled with in.

Ryan--He's now ending his 3rd week of his class at New River. Because of his Asperger's he has a counselor we can go to for help and guidance. She has found that Mrs. Audus, his teacher says he's a delight and a wonderful addition to her class. He participates, is ready and prepared. We worry, due to his perfectionism tendencies-- and his head banging at home on the computer as he's doing school work-- if he's 'getting it'. She says he's doing well and we'll let him take the lead about getting tutor. I'm so please with how well New River works with kids that have disabilities. What a blessing that we live so close to this institution.

At home he got an A on his first chemistry test, and still need to complete his labs, but he's doing better this year with it, than two years ago when we tried it. I think it's because he's got a better understanding with math. For American Literature, he's reading short stories and excerpts from sermons and essays by various authors, one is by Martin Luther circa 1517. In history he's studying People's Law vs. Ruler's Law.

Connor--Geography- He finished up the US map, drawing by memory, and placement of capitals, and major features. On the final "test" his friend ended up with 51 states, and he only had 49 states. I told him Noah must've stole one! :) He still can't figure out which state he's missing. They have moved on to Canada for next week.
Algebra is going well. He's still doing review work and loving Mrs. Lo and her challenging questions.
For science his research for the past two weeks were on Kingdom Monera and Fungi. His IEW papers are on Noah and Abraham and Issac.

Cailin-Life of Fred math is still going well. Yeah! Science fun still going strong...she's made another edible cell, this time out of jello. She wrote three poems for IEW and is doing "boring" (as quoted by her) copy work for English. I keep telling her, that's how the founding fathers learned, there must be something to it. She's reading about the Native Americans and learning more about symbols of our history...the flag and our National Anthem and it's origin. We learned how to make a 5 pointed star with just one cut of scissors. By folding a square sheet of paper in a certain way and with one cut, we made a perfect star like Betsy Ross.

Delaney and Liam- Combining her social studies and his preschool together is still going well. Letter of the week was S, for stars and stripes. This was a busy week so we didn't get to do as many activities as I would have liked, but that's okay, there's next week.
Delaney is working on silent E in phonics and I'm having her read many different books from the library, if they aren't too wordy, she does quite well. She's even figuring out some of the words that we haven't gone over. Math is still fun and she's working on memorizing her +2's. and skip counting 1-4's. by singing them.

Brianne--As for our sweet angel, she's doing well with her therapy. She now stands with out any leg jerking. She will side step along the sofa with help. She still cries when she's scared but she now stops and plays and will calm down on her own, plus her crying bursts are short lived. Yesterday, she and Susan cruised around the house hand in hand. She still loves music and will sway and swing her arms about when the kids sing or music is playing...she especially likes this weeks song of the history sentence about pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact.

We ended our week with a trip playing with friends at Bissett Park. Explore Now had their annual picnic/kick-off to the school year.