Well, last week went better than expected considering our sudden trip out of town to help a dear friend out as her family welcomed their beautiful new baby.
We ended up working through the weekend to compensate. I didn't follow our entire daily rhythm then (more on that in a minute), but we did have work in some math and reading every day.
So our daily rhythm is definitely in need of a bit tweaking and rearranging, I think. We're trying to center circle time around the Wild One for now, since that's pretty much the only part of our day that allows him to participate fully. This morning he seemed to enjoy the songs and verses, though. More than he has before, anyway. But I also realized this morning that we've been forgetting our candle-lighting verses all week. I use the traditional Steiner school verses when we light our candles, because I think the memorization and the ritual of it all is so good for the kids. Wild One gets to snuff the candle just before main lesson time (we like to conserve our candles a bit). So I have to take sometime, sit down with some new verses, and really work to create a circle time that's going to speak to everyone.
Another addition to circle time this year (last year we did it at a different time) is the math facts flash cards from Making Math Meaningful. This year all three of the grades age kids can participate, so it's been a lot of fun. I'm not a huge fan of flash cards, but the kids decorated these themselves last year and they really love doing them every day.
HRH's main lesson stories have been surprisingly well-received so far. I was worried about transitioning from fairy tales to fables, but she loves the fables, and the pictures she's been putting in her main lesson book are quite beautiful. I'm definitely seeing the effect of public school art class on her, though, and it's been a bit of a struggle to convince her that our pictures don't start with an outline. I think I'm actually going to bite the bullet and purchase Coloring with Block Crayons by Sieglinde de Francesca. I've wanted it for a long time but never really could justify the expense. I've heard really great things about it, though, and I'm thinking it's going to be worth it.
Evil Genius is working on a local geography block right now. He's mapped our apartment, the state, and the Erie Canal, and we've learned about the Hudson River a bit. We've also talked a little bit about the Dutch immigrants that settled this area. Yesterday we walked down to the NYS Museum ("I love being able to walk to everything, Mom!") and took note of the date plaques on downtown buildings. At the museum, we spent some extra time at the Ellis Island exhibit to talk about immigration, and then longer still in the Discovery area where the mapping of the Erie Canal took place. We're going to spend the rest of the week focusing on the Hudson River and early settlements in New York. I think next week, per Evil Genius's request, we're moving on to the Adirondacks. (He was appalled and devastated to see how many species had been wiped out from the Adirondacks completely by the early part of the last century.)
I took some advice from Taproot teacher training this summer and Evil Genius is now getting is form for form drawing on Monday, practicing it all week, then committing it to his form drawing book on Thursday. That seems to have taken a lot of the stress of perfectionism off him.
Hufflepuff is absolutely enamored with her geology/mineralogy lesson block. She's decided that her research paper is going to be on Chrome Tremolite, and she sketched it and took notes at the museum yesterday. Today she learned how to properly cite books and articles as sources, and how to start an outline. We're also talking about the layers of the Earth and tonight she's going to start needle felting a model.
Latin is coming along very well, I think. We're using Wheelock's Latin right now, and just getting started, but she's really grasping everything she's read so far and is ready to just jump right in. We're going to see how this goes. I'd love to get Rosetta Stone Latin (our old library had it and we fell in love with it), but there has also been talk of getting Rosetta Stone German next year, and getting two different programs is definitely cost prohibitive.
Hufflepuff is also still working through Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents and still just loving the series. She's having so much fun with it, and I love the amount of review that she gets with each new chapter.
So that's our first week and a half of homeschooling this year.
Oh, and lots of Oregon Trail was played.
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