Week Two of the Experiment

This past week we have worked a lot, especially outside. We now have 9 chickens and our garden is almost completely in. And the girls had their end-of-the-year dance recital so that took up quite a bit of their time this week. Overall, it was still a good week.

Kezzi is doing very well continuing on with her routine. The rest have been forgetting to write down their activities and they often forget to read unless I remind them. I may not require the writing down of everything and keep some notes of what I see happening. Another thing we are going to adjust this week is getting our required things out of the way in the morning because it's too hard to reign everyone in after lunch. Many times The Cousins are available to play or Dad is wanting boys to help down at the shop or go do errands with him. Luke requested we do our two hours together in the morning so the afternoons are completely free and I think I'm going to try that.

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We played some fun math games last week - Smath (which Luke was surprisingly good at) and a card game from Number Jugglers. I also read some of our MathStart readers to Annalise. I'm getting a lot of inspiration from lurking on the Living Math email group and I've got quite a few books from the Living Math website on hold at the library. I ordered Noble Knights of Knowledge this week and we can't wait to get it. I think Annalise is really going to benefit from this more relaxed approach. I'm going to use more games and "living books" with her and hold off on requiring too much in the way of a formal text. I do have quite a few workbooks (Miquon, Math U See and some Singapore) for her to use when she wants to. I've really been enjoying having FUN with math.
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We have almost finished up our Ancient Greek studies and we are heading into Rome. We hope to read Augustus Caesar's World this summer. I'm planning on having Hope and the boys make an ABC Book of Rome. We only have one day of our Kamana daily exercises left and then we are going to focus on finishing the Resource Trail section, which looks mostly like making notebook pages on different things. We are still plugging away at It Happened in America. Last week we did Massachusetts and I'm supposed to make a Boston Creme Pie from our fifty states cookbook next.

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Current Read Alouds: The boys and Annalise are in the middle of listening to The Tale of Troy on audio and also Kidnapped. I was reading Kidnapped aloud - and hating it - so I switched to an audio book of that too. I finished D'Aulaire's George Washington to Annalise and as she is always twisting my arm for fairy tales, I started The Wonder Clock with her and the boys listened in. Dad is reading The Swamp Robber (Sugar Creek Gang) to the boys before bed. I'm also still working through Education of Little Tree and we just started Heaven For Kids by Randy Alcorn. Plus our family read aloud of The Master Plan of Evangelism.