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.

J began his kindergarten math this past week (it’s so nice not being tied to a specific calendar…we just move on to the next thing!), and today he learned about triangles.  He got to make a triangle hat out of a sheet of newspaper, which he thought was big fun!

The rest of school today is sort of flaky.  G woke up feeling “dizzy and like he was about to collapse.”  (He can be a bit dramatic at times. )  So that threw off our schedule a bit.  But now he is feeling better and decided to do some school.  (He probably knows that if he feels better and wants to play, he’ll be stuck doing school first. )  So now he is writing a business letter to Lego, to make a suggestion for some Star Wars ship he thinks they should create.