Razorback Academy

Well I have pretty much fallen off the blogging bandwagon, but I’m hoping to at least be able to blog about our school stuff a bit more regularly.

Key word: hoping.

Our biggest changes occurred in the sort of curriculum we use. We used to use BJU HomeSat for the 3 Rs, Tapestry of Grace, and Apologia for science. Well for some reason, this past fall that whole plan was just a disaster, after having worked just fine for the previous 3 years! After several months of experimenting and basic craziness, I think we have finally arrived on something workable!!!

We are using My Father’s World: Rome to the Reformation for history, and We. Love. It. We jumped right into the events after the fall of Rome since we had gotten that far in our other curriculum, and it’s going very well. This week we are studying Charlemagne, the Celts, Britain, and Augustine. We began a unit on chess, and that is a lot of fun. I think it’s pretty cool that chess is school.

I have put together my own geography/world cultures study using the Trail Guide to World Geography as a spine. We are just finishing up the United States and are about to embark for Mexico.

For science we still use the Apologia elementary series. This year we are learning about Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day. So far we have learned about whales, seals and sea cows, aquatic herps, and aquatic primeval reptiles. We were supposed to start our chapter on fish today, but C and J have fevers. So maybe Friday!

As a way to transition G to more independent work, he is working through the book on his own. So far it’s going really well. He’s always been interested in marine life anyway, so this was totally up his alley.

We attempted an experiment to see if temperature affected the growth of tadpoles. Wellllllllllllllllll…….now our goal is to have our tadpole (note the singular noun) reach adulthood. I guess it’s a lesson that sometimes experiments don’t go the way we’d like them to.

At this point in time I’ve foregone formal reading curriculums and am just having the kids read chapter books and narrarate to me. This is an experiment, since I’ve still got lots of questions about narration, particularly when I have no idea what the book is about and the child doesn’t really understand the book either and therefore narrates the wrong information LOL!

We have found a great new spelling program, All About Spelling. I started everyone out in level 1 just for the foundations, and it’s going really well. I have the older 3 doing it at the same time, so this saves on time. We do 1-2 steps a day rather than having it take a long time. J is still working through step 1 of level 1, but I think he’s about to move to step 2. Yay!

Another Big Hit this year is our new writing curriculum, Writing With Ease. Wow. There again I started everyone at the beginning to build the foundational skills necessary to move onto higher writing, and I’m so glad I did because I can see where those skills were lacking. So they are moving through at a faster pace, but they are building some really great skills. I just wish Susan Wise Bauer had her upper levels of The Complete Writer written! Once we get done with level 4 of WWE, I’ll have to find something else, though at this point I’m leaning toward Classical Writing.

Our last Big Change was in math. We are now using Math-U-See. My kids have always done fine with whatever math curriculum we’ve used, but the more I learned about MUS, the more I liked it.  So once BJU HomeSat went by the wayside, we switched. I’ve been very pleased so far! G is working through Epsilon. He’s had some fraction work before, so some lessons take him no time at all. But he has to spend a lot more time in other lessons. C is flying through Gamma. He’s had plenty of multiplication in the past, but he still needed some work on his facts, and I think all this extra practice is helping him with that. L is doing the same thing with Alpha for the same reason. J is in Alpha as well, just moving way slower.

I’ve been trying to narrow down our selections for next year. I think I’m just about done except for G’s science.

R has learned a new skill.  And I did shoot this video during school time today (note the spelling list on my lap LOL).  So I guess it can count as “education?”

We are studying ancient Israel right now.  Recently G, C, and L made a salt dough map of Israel, and then they painted it according to the tribal allocations.

We recently finished a chapter on bats in our Zoology 1 (Flying Creatures of the 5th Day) book.  We learned that bat mothers leave their babies in a nursery, with many, MANY other bat babies.  When the bat mothers return, they are able to find their own babies by smell. So we became “bat mothers.”

We took 20 cotton balls and put different smelly substances on them: vanilla extract, toothpaste, vinegar, laundry detergent, perfume, etc.  The the kids took turns choosing a cotton ball to be their “pup.”  Then we would blindfold them and hold different “pups” up to their noses.  When they smelled the smell they had chosen, they would say, “That’s my pup!”

They loved it.

We have been learning about flying animals this year in science, and the first part of the year was spent learning about birds.  We hung a suet feeder right outside our front window, since we spend most of our time in the school room.  We have noticed a particular bird that likes to eat it, and we used our bird field guide to figure out what it is!

We have a Red-shafted Northern Flicker!

We also discovered that a smaller bird may be building a nest in a birdhouse we have on our front porch.  We haven’t been able to get close enough to figure out exactly what kind it is, but maybe we’ll have some babies soon!

I thought I’d share what a week looks like for us for history.

Tapestry of Grace recommends a Monday-Friday week. I’ve also heard of some families doing Friday-Thursday so that the children can read over the weekend. At this point in our school, we have found it best to just be flexible, so we don’t have a set length of how long we spend on a TOG Week. Sometimes it only takes us 3 days to get through the material, and other times it takes us 7 days. It varies. It’s a bonus when I can plan a week Monday-Friday, but sometimes we’ll finish things up the next Monday or Tuesday and then go ahead and start the next Week in TOG.

I try to read the Teacher’s Notes over the weekend prior to starting a new Week. This past week we did Week 15 in Year 1, which is The Promised Land: Conquest and Settlement.

Day 1:

I literally copied this from the Student Threads from the yellow Overview section. I do not include the people/vocabulary words because I learned early on this year that our reading assignments may or may not cover those people/vocabulary words, and I got tired of dealing with that. So I gave up LOL.

I read this aloud off the board.

Then we moved on to geography. I used the geography assignment from the Student Assignment Pages. I try to do the geography assignments earlier in the week so that as we read, my children already have a vague familiarity with the locations. This also allows us to refer back to any maps that we have worked on.

I broke down and bought this earlier in the year:

It is a rhetoric level resource, but IMO it’s a necessary one for even LG.  I wish they would list it as such.  My UG child filled out his map according to the assignment:

while I helped my LG students fill out theirs.  Usually I print out the teacher’s map from the MapAids CD, but this week’s teacher’s map is wrong (I have been told they have corrected CDs available, but I don’t have one), so this week I printed out maps for them and then filled it out for them as we all did it together.  (Too much writing.)

Then we did a color-coded map for the tribes of Israel:

There is an example map in the Teacher’s Notes, but no black-line map, so I had to make my own.  I have Uncle Josh’s outline map book, so I copied an Ancient Israel map and drew in the tribal boundaries with Sharpie and then copied them all for my dc.  We did all of this together, using the map from the Teacher’s Notes as a guide.

(Come to find out there is a tribal map on the MapAids CD for week *16*.  I will have to mark that in my IG for week 15 so I know to look there next time around!)

Day 2:
Read from 

TOG recommends another child’s Bible, but I hated it and started using this one instead.

Day 3:
Read from 

and put together a salt map of Israel (instructions are in Old Testment Days):

They will paint it next week after it dries (this is included in the TOG assignments).

There were a few other hands-on activities we could have done, but I’m not a very “hands-on” mom, so my kids thought I was awesome for letting them do this.

Day 4:
We filled out the booklets for our Unit 2 lapbooks:

and then we went over the threads, people, and vocabulary for the week, as a review:

This was a lightish week, so that is why we only did it for 4 days.

We learned about the Inuit briefly a couple weeks ago, but we borrowed a DVD from the library and watched it this morning.

We all thought it was VERY interesting!  It was filmed in the 20s, but it was made to look like what life was like for the Inuit around 1900.  And honestly not a whole lot had changed from ancient times to then for the Inuit.  So we were able to get a glimpse of what ancient Native Americans lived like.

We definitely recommend this DVD!

We are now studying early ancient Greece: the Cycladic, Minoan, Mycenaean, and Trojan cultures.  The Minoans who lived on Crete had very distinctive art works, and one method they used a lot of was the fresco.  So today G, C, and L created their own frescoes.

Here is C, starting to draw his image on his plaster:

And here he is almost finished:

Here is G, working on his (he painted a cheetah): 

Here is L’s finished flower fresco:

(Then of course I had to break out the paper so that S and J could paint also!)

Shamrock Shakes!

We also watched the VeggieTale, Sumo of the Opera.  There is a short on the DVD about St. Patrick.  C can pretty much quote the whole thing, including accents, but it’s always fun to watch again.  It’s one of our favorites!  And it’s history!

A couple of weeks ago, we studied Ancient China.  The kids enjoyed learning about the different ancient Chinese inventions.  They particularly liked the earthquake detector:

When an earthquake would occur, little balls in the dragons’ mouths (the squiggly things hanging off the side of the jar) would drop into the frogs’ mouths below.

We also learned why and how the emperor of China built the Great Wall.  And then the kids built a Lego model out of it:

I personally found it fascinating that the ancient Chinese really didn’t have any contact with any other culture prior to about 200 BC.  It makes sense though…with the Himalayas to the southwest, a desert to the west, and the Pacific Ocean to the east, it’s not like it was an easy trek to explore other areas!