How goes your January Learning?

We started back on January 4th. We actually tried to start back Dec 28th, because due to illness we started break early, but it was too hard with our routine still off (DH teaches so when he’s home, while we love it, it’s also disrupting to our regular routine) and New Year’s etc… So we only got a couple days in.

We made some pretty major changes. We ditched our CLE language arts and reading, since I realized that really it was largely review, so he was sitting doing almost an hour of seatwork for stuff he didn’t need. So we’re now doing literature daily (mixing it up between a good childrens novel, poetry and fables/tables) with narration and copywork. We’ll start grammar (Harvey’s Grammar), dictation and spelling (we’ll draw our words from his dictation/written work) in the fall (grade 4). We also ditched the science program we were going to do (Science in the Ancient World) and are just focusing on nature study and living books – I bought the Burgess Animal book to read through, but the chapters are a bit long for my 8 year old who is highly visual and doesn’t do great with auditory input. We have two old texts that are great “A Book of Canadian Animals” and “A Second Book of Canadian Animals.” Great living books, the chapters are shorter, so I’m thinking of not doing Burgess, and instead just reading a chapter a day of our books and once a week having him do kind of a journal entry where he chooses one and draws it, and can do a written narration about that animal. For history we’re sticking with SOTW which is going fabulously, as well as our CLE math. We also are getting more serious about picture, music, poetry and hymn study.

For my daughter (5), for the most part we’re continuing informally. She does love workbooks, so we’re using CLE KII workbooks that I just let her do as she wishes. She joins in on our daily Bible reading and she’s been doing very simple narration with that, as well as our picture/music etc… studies. She’s also doing daily copywork. She knows her letter sounds, so I’ve been working with her informally on word building. Mostly using games, letter tiles. When it comes time to get more serious I plan on using the McGuffey readers, but I imagine we’ll hold off till fall for that. For math, again, we’re just doing informal number work. She already knows her numbers to 100, understands the concept of subtraction and addition, knows her clock, can use a ruler, understands whole and half, calendar etc… so… really we’re just spending the year focusing on math in the context of daily life. We do have a great little Montessori-style game, where she rolls two die, and then adds the numbers together using manipulatives. She then writes out the number sentence on her slate. She loves doing that.

So far, everything is going well. January looks to be our “easy” month, only 2 appointments!!! We have several appointments coming up in February including an overnight one, so I know schedule/routine is going to suffer that month. We’re looking at a possible bowel biopsy for DD as well later this spring, and dental surgery, but I’m hoping those will be much later in the spring. Our fall was horrible with so many appointments and running around, I would appreciate some “down time” to just enjoy our lessons!

Things are going pretty smoothly. We only took a week off in Dec because DH only had Christmas Day and New Years day off. It was a nice holiday time, but nice to get back to routine. I feel like more than a week and tough to get back on schedule.  For us what works is either go big, summer vacation, or keep breaks short, week or less.

We are almost into the third trimester, day 100 was last Friday (Our state requires 172 days) It gave me the extra “boost” to start with excitement 🙂 We start early Aug and finish late April. It is so nice to take May off and Aug is so hot starting back early works well for us. It also gets me over the Feb “slump” because we are so close to being done 🙂

We are really enjoying Early Modern Times, Visits to North America, Apologia Swimming Creatures, , MUS, SW, ULW, picture study, poetry study and this year hymn study for the first time.

I anticipate no big changes for next year, just moving up the next level. This year has been our smoothest year yet even though the busiest with things other than school. The kids are taking a lot more “ownership”

I’m trying to figure out what I am going to expect for the next couple of months. We started back into a regular schedule at the beginning of this month, and it was going pretty smoothly, but we just found out for sure that we will be leaving for Africa in mid-Feb. For a while it looked as if that might not happen, so I’m trying to shift gears now.

I still want to keep on top of history, math, reading and copywork. We do memory and a hymn at breakfast, so that should continue no matter how our schedule changes.

I guess right now I am just trying to find the balance between getting the things done that need to be taken care of before we leave, spending time with family before we say goodbye, and school. My preliminary thought is to drop many of our “extras”;  we read aloud often as a family, and the kids are pretty good about doing art, writing, music etc. on their own time anyway. If we cut back to maybe an hour of school a day, it would help a lot.

Does that sound reasonable? I just don’t want to drop everything for a month and then try to jump back in in the middle of adjusting to a completely new normal.

Glad to see everyone’s year is going well! 🙂 Looks like we are all making good progress.

We area 3/4 through General Science and 1/2 through Pre Algebra so those are going very well. Everything else is harder to peg down. We are using Truthquest for history and we are about 1/3 through the book so far. I can’t schedule out how long it will take us to finish since every day’s lesson is different. The other subjects are just things where we finish one study and simply move on to the next whatever time of year it may be.

Our days were getting too long so we have decided to rotate picture study, Shakespeare and Plutarch instead of doing one of each per term. That has allowed all 3 to fit into one time slot and helped quite a bit. We were also finding that we were moving too quickly through the picture portfolios and were going to run out of artists to study if we didn’t slow down! I love the picture portfolios and really don’t want to use anything else for picture study at this time. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of new artists to study! We are covering art history through Truthquest so that adds to our art study as well.

Over all, I am very pleased with our progress so far.

@Melanie32, there were several posts freed from the spam trap this morning. I’m guessing your post was one of them that was freed. ?