Heart of Wisdom Academy: January 2014

Glimpse of my Day

A Day in Our Homeschool: Unedited

Monday, January 20, 2014

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Homeschool

Semester 2 week 1 2014

Monday, January 20, 2014

Began second semester
Kyle's new reading books: The Giver, Animal Farm, Shades of Gray, and Around the World in 80 days
Kyle began Unit 5 from Institute of Excellence in Writing; Writing from Pictures a unit on descriptive writing.

The twins do most of their spelling and dictation exercises on the big white board. I can easily see what each of them is doing, and work with Kason at the table simultaneously. It is the biggest hassle finding and keeping sharpened pencils around here, not to mention pencil sharpeners and staplers have a ridiculously short life span in my house. Why...I don't know

This week from Hands on Science Mysteries the kids had to find the source behind the Bubonic Plague. As an exercise they studied the predator-prey relationship. Here they are cutting out animals and lining up prey and predators. They also watched some cool predator videos on Netflix.

Kason working on writing. This week he finally learned how to write his "s" in the write direction!

Kyle working independently. (Writing, typing, math games, ixl math, spanish)

Kids volcanoes which we later erupted!!! Lots of fun. Plus a couple of volcano videos on Netflix.

cutie pie :-)

This is where she spends most of the school day, and if ever I had a secret to "getting it all done", this would be it.

We started our Geography Studies this month. Every child picked a country and we're studying it together. Youngest student goes first; Kason picked Israel. I bought an Israel lapbook and we are slowly going through that. It is fun and we're learning a lot. We also got lots of books and a couple of videos from the library on Israel. Lapbooks take enough time as there is, now, I only use free lapbooks which there are a ton of free ones at homeschool share, or I buy one. But no more, making my own. Time IS money.

Kyle is taking a break from Rosetta Stone. I have him working on StudySpanish.com for grammar. There is a lot of debate about whether you should teach grammar or not. But on their website they articulated exactly what I've observed, which is; you can learn in a few days with grammar what would take you months to learn by immersion. I downloaded the Duolingo app for him, which also reinforces grammar.