Weekly Report

History/Geography – While I think we’ll all the quite happy to have a brake from revolutions for a while we did have fun reading about France, and cooking baguettes! I think Chelsea particularly enjoyed reading the books on France because she was able to remember some of the places where she’d been.
When we learn about history in other countries I like to spend some time learning about the country it’s self. Since we got back to school we’ve read about Australia and France, with Russia coming up next week. There are maps of all these countries on the walls of our school room, along with ones of Canada, US, British Columbia and the world.
Our four favourite history/geography books this week were Paris 1789, France, You Wouldn’t Want to be an Aristocrat in the French Revolution and Daily Life in Ancient and Modern Paris.
Paris 1789 is a “travel guide” perfect for thee grammar years and lower logic years. Reading makes you feel like a tourist in Paris on the eve of the revolution. There are “Sightseers Tips” on every page which add to the fun. There are more books in the Sightseers series which we have used before and look forward to using again.
France is from the Horrible History series. I find the books on the sarcastic and gruesome side but let my horrible loving kids read them. I wouldn’t have even thought of this one if I hadn’t been digging through a box of books I’d stashed away. I wasn’t going to look through the box because I would want to keep just about every book and I was trying to sell them. It’s a good thing I did look through the box because I found France and some other books which I’d been thinking of buying. :D
If there’s a series of books we’re obsessed with it’s the You Wouldn’t Want to be a ____ books. Like the Sightseer books they make you be the people in the book and show you just how bad life was like at XYZ time. There are lots of humorous pictures and “Handy Hints” to help you out along the way.
While Daily Life in Ancient and Modern Paris doesn’t have much on the revolution it is well written and clearly shows the changes of the city through the ages. Mariah, David and Chelsea read the entire book and are now asking their Parisian friends how their life and lives of their ancestors compares to the books descriptions.

French – We got very excited about doing French this week. Many of the books included French words and when we knew one of them the house went into party mode! lol We’ve been slogging through French recently and often don’t get it done at all. Next year I want us all to do French; Mariah, Chelsea and David in a formal manner and Laura, Megan and David more informally. Some other moms and I have been talking about starting a small co-op for our preschool – 4th graders and I’m thinking of teaching French. I think a word of the week approach would be good, but I’ll have to see what others think. If we do that then I’d like to do some extra French with my kids, maybe a word of the day.
Mariah and David are currently doing Rosetta Stone 1 and 2 but I’d like them to switch to something else, Rosetta Stone lacks grammar but I think that being able to hear French spoken is very good. I haven’t spent much time thinking about what curriculum to use for them, but I need to. There is always so much to do.


Science – I’ve thought a lot about doing science projects and have decided to drop the idea. Right now we’ve almost (I think) got our house sold, I’m very pregnant and am constantly getting exhausted, DH is very busy at work and the idea of doing science projects is just too much for us. We love Green Hour so we’ll continue with that and we are also starting on a bird study tomorrow (is it really tomorrow? YIKES!). I need to see roughly how much longer this “school year” will last, pregnancy and moving house will cause some disturbance but I’m praying that we will be done by mid August. That seems very far away, but I know time will fly!

Weekly Report

I haven’t done “weekly” report since January!!

History – Our first week of doing SOTW3 together was GREAT! We really liked going learning about Captain Cook because 1. He explored locally. 2. We read about Australia and made another pavlova which was really good. 3. We got to read a lot of books. There we’re probably some other reasons but those are the most obvious. We’ll be finishing up on Captain Cook today and on Monday we’ll be doing the French Revolution, there are mixed feelings about this. We’re getting a bit tired of revolutions because we just spent two weeks on the American Revolution but we also know people who live in France and we’re asking them what they think about the revolution which will be interesting.

Science – Thoughts on science are whizzing through my brain faster than I can process them! Trivium Academy has been such a blessing because of their Science by Seasons plans which I’ve adapted for us and because there’s a lot of science planning going on there too. Right now we’re doing Green Hour (yes, we’re still doing them even though I haven’t been posting) and science projects for the upcoming science fair. By Monday I want everyone to have decided what they’re doing. We were doing chemistry and physics but they’ve been dropped except for informal reading which the kids do during free time.

Art and music appreciation – We’ve gotten back into them after a two month break. We studied Mozart and Rembrandt this week and will continue for a week or two. After that we’ll do Van Gogh and Beethoven, then Monet and Tchaikovsky (?) if we need to do some more I’ll think about that later. We’re really enjoying both our artist and musician, we do Rembrandt colouring pages while listening to Mozart. There was great disappointment over the fact that we couldn’t find any Mozart music in our violin/piano books.

Logic – We’ve stopped doing Fallacy Detective this year. I LOVE that book, love, love, LOVE it. But for now I feel that we would be more productive spending our time elsewhere. I have put our logic/critical thinking books and games in a prominent place so that if interested DC can take a look at them. When I’m not thinking about science I’m thinking logic. Next year Chelsea begins the “logic years” and I have every intention of her beginning a logic/critical thinking curriculum. David and Mariah will do Fallacy Detective and I know that Chelsea could too. She has a mathematical/logical brain and would be mentally ready for FD, but I’m not sure about emotionally. What really worries me is abortion, which seems to be a major topic FD. It would bring Chelsea to tears, it brings me to tears too but I’m not sure there is any way that she’d understand or want to understand. I’ve looked at other things, but FD still seems to be the best fit. I’m going to have to think and post about this.

I’m trying to organize all our books on Shelfari, now easy task when you have over 2,000! I haven’t done any in days, I think I’ll try for 25 a day and when I get more into it I’ll try for more. The hardest part is choosing where to start, I settled on first grade biology and I’m still there. :D I also have to buy our science books and there seem to be so few on biologists, ancient scientists and hibernation. I’m sure that as I buy and catalogue some more I’ll find even more topics that I can’t find books on. *Sigh*