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April Homeschool Happenings 2016
Every month it gets to the end, and I sit back and think, “I’ve accomplished nothing,” because I honestly vaguely remember doing stuff, but I don’t remember what. I don’t know if all homeschooling moms feel like this, but I certainly do.
Bible
My Sunday School class has started on Judges, and it’s been fun to see, the kids starting to make connections with different parts of the Bible (they had a lot of fun acting out the first 3 Judges, Othneil, Ehud, and Shamgar).
I’ve started a mother/daughter Bible study with one of the ladies from my church, and we’re learning together how to study the Bible with our daughters. It’s actually part of an ebook I’m writing (and am over halfway through writing, having someone actually use it gives me amazing incentives). I’m going to be including rough drafts of the chapters in my newsletter starting next Friday (May 6) if you’d like to get a sneak preview.
Oh, and I almost forgot, Princess and I went to a super cool Mother/Daughter event about being women of God (Jeff had grand plans of talks with the boys while on a camping trip, but massive mosquitoes, and rain ruined his plans).
Homeschool Geography
We finally finished our study of California yesterday. Though I want to finish one of the activities I had planned later today.
We read about 20 books about California, and learned all sorts of facts, like did you know California has a state gold day? It celebrates when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill. I’ll be getting pictures of our lapbook pages, and will be posting all about that soon, hopefully. I’m trying to be proactive and actually pretend I have a plan for my posts and in theory I’ll put this out in May.
We made no progress on our international studies, but next week we’re going to learn about Ireland, and I’ve found a lot of books about the Loch Ness Monster…..
Homeschool History
We did stuff, which apparently I have no pictures of with the exception of what I did this week, so according to my pictures we learned about the start of modern schooling, the Thirty Years War, and jousting. Because jousting field trip, of which I took about 30 pictures of horses solely because they looked so cool. Can you guess the event we’ve shown in Legos?
In addition, I know our the Mystery of History 3* book talked about the English Civil War, the founding of a couple of American colonies, and Galileo. I mainly remember Galileo because I spent quite a while stalking the schedule at TXMOST to see their Galileo video at the planetarium.
Homeschool Math
I forget if I said this or not, but right after I wrote my Life of Fred review and how much I loved it for Princess she insisted on switching back to Math U See because she was afraid her brother’s were getting ahead of her. I still think Life of Fred is a better fit, but we’re having discussions right now. We’ll see what happens next year.
In other news, the boys finally found a math they did not understand within 2 minutes of looking at it. We learned about circumference and area, and it wasn’t instinctual. I’m planning a review week this summer with the Knights of Sir Cumfrence*. I figure when they don’t have other pressures going on, it’ll probably fall into place.
Homeschool Science
We hit anatomy, in our CKE Biology, and I had big plans of doing all sorts of review activities, and then April hit, and we didn’t do as much as I wanted, we’re also having fun trying out a different science curriculum, you’ll hear all about tomorrow (as part of my continuing goal of writing reviews of all curriculum I’ve ever used).
Instead, we did a super fun science demonstration about bacteria reproduction in the By Design Science Curriculum, which my kids thought was the coolest thing ever.
DON’T FORGET TO ENTER THE CKE CHEMISTRY GIVEAWAY FROM MONDAY
Life in General
Part of why life got so busy and distracted, is we had the boys’ birthday party a week or so ago, and I insisted the house be clean.
That same day we had a big huge field trip to Lysts on the Lake and got to see real jousting, which the kids all enjoyed, and they found lots of wild onions, which we just cooked into a meal last night. These were rather small wild onions, so a lot of them did not give much food, but they sure had a strong pleasant smell.
Oh and my dog found an opossum during the boys party and was quite upset I didn’t let him get into an all out brawl with the furiously hissing creature.
And then the Monday right after was our homeschool group’s demonstration day, and the kids each had a report they wrote for that, so we took an entire week to work on their writing, and how to research online, and put together a presentation. It was a stressful if rewarding week.
On the blog in April
I finally finished updating my entire Bible category, so now all the posts look pretty, and actually are organized. This past week or so I started updating the history category and got a few posts updated: Timelines for Preschool, Stonehenge, and Gunfight at the OK Corral. I’ll be updating my ages and ages old posts on California sometime in the next week with the activities we did this past month.
What was popular this month?
Well, a lot of the things that are popular every month,
Tips on Teaching Distractible Children
The Day I threatened public school
And, I was going to schedule this for tomorrow (Thursday morning), but I feel like just hitting publish, go figure.
Comments
10 responses to “April Homeschool Happenings 2016”
We are currently using Life of Fred along side Math U See. They seem to work well together. Have a great month of May! I can’t believe April is almost over.
Blessings, DawnI agree, they do seem to go together well. Right now, when the boys finish their week’s worth of math, they do Life of Fred chapters as a bit of “fun math.” They like doing that.
I am going to have to do a monthly wrap-up too, instead of the weekly ones. Jousting is Maryland’s state sport, so we see it a lot. Do you like CKE Biology? How does it compare to Apologia?
Okay that is so cool about jousting.
I really like CKE, but doing CKE Biology after doing all 3 years of Apologia Biology and Anatomy, is more of a review, so it’s hard to make a decent comparison.
I’d say CKE is great for elementary, because it covers about the right amount of material, and has some form of hands on activity each week. The sheer amount of information always overwhelmed my kids when we did Apologia.
I’m guessing, next year will be our last year with CKE, because I want a meatier science for junior high and high school, but I’m not quite sure what I’ll switch to then. Maybe back to Apologia, because it always felt like the perfect level for junior high.
This sounds like a very busy month. I’d guess that it was a LEGO guillotine up there? I find it admirable that Princess wants to keep up with her brothers in math.
Close, but this was before the guillotine was invented, they are demonstrating the defenestration of Prague, when the Protestants pushed 3 Catholic city council members out the window, because they were sure the councilors were going to take away their right to worship. The councilors survived because they landed on a pile of poop. That is what started the 30 Years War.
Three guys pushed out the window.If I wasn’t finding our current disagreements over math so frustrating, I too would think it’s pretty awesome.
What a lovely month – and you did heaps 🙂
I’m so behind on everything, but hubby is in bath at the moment so I’m attempting to catch up a bit. Thank you so much for your prayers, they were very appreciated xxI was so glad to read he was back home and safely recovering.
It was a fabulous month, just rather tiring.
I did not know about State Gold Day in spite of living in California with a fourth grader who has been studying this state the entire year!
Yeah, I didn’t remember it from my California history when I was there either (you know more than 20 years ago).
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