What a refreshing week! After one week of vacation/planning time for Mom and another week shortened by the Fall Youth Retreat, it was a blessing to get back to "normal" school.
One of my goals in taking a vacation week was to have some time to be able to assess what was working, where we needed to change things and just come to grips with the first two months of homeschooling. The biggest change I made was to go through our Story of the World text and group the chapters into civilizations. We've enjoyed the studies, but it's felt a bit like we're hopping and skipping all over the place. I understand the idea behind it, but I'd prefer to be able to focus on one area and get a bit deeper.
We are currently studying Ancient China. We're pulling those chapters from Story of the World and supplementing with a lapbook study I found on Homschool Share and books checked out from the library. I've also been adding in videos and web pages as suggested by our Usborne Internet-Linked History Encyclopedia and other recommendations I've found online.
We are absolutely loving it.
This week, we learned about and painted pictograms:
We also moved on from there to calligraphy:
We even carved potatoes to make our own printing blocks after learning that movable type was invented in China.
We love it. After we were done with the calligraphy, they put together a little play about an Empress and her messengers, complete with costumes, musical instruments (well, it was a set of wind chimes played with a chopstick), and an evil plot. A little unorthodox, perhaps, but it was wonderful to see the kids wrap what they had learned into a story.
I realized this week how wonderful it is to homeschool in the age of the Internet. While studying silk and silkworms, Caleb what silk worms looked like. It took maybe 60 seconds to do a quick search and find multiple videos on everything from silkworms to silk production and beyond. I can't imagine not having that world of information at our fingertips!
We do have a master timeline in the dining room that we'll be adding to with important dates from each ancient civilization we study, and the kids are enjoying seeing that build. It also made sense to tailor our geography studies to the area of the world we're studying - it's all seemed much more organic to me. I was also happy to find that we hadn't read the stories in our Hero Tales book about missionaries to China yet.
The kids continued with the math, spelling, handwriting and Bible studies as usual. I moved a little closer to unit based studies for literature as well, and that move has been nearly as positive as the changes to our history studies. Hanna has continued her science studies, but we're realizing that Dad is a much better science teacher than Mom is. We're going to have to ponder ways to wrap science around his schedule. Caleb is ready for a more formal science curriculum and I'm hoping to have a decision made soon on where to go with that as well as language arts.
Now that the basics are running so much more smoothly, I'm feeling more comfortable with beginning to add in music, art, poetry, nature study and Shakespeare over the next few weeks and months. I'm definitely a fan of one new thing at a time - homeschooling is still so very new to us and I find it so incredibly easy to get overwhelmed!
In Mom-business, I'm working on our plans for Advent, a December study of Christmas Around the World and considering ways to implement a modified December Daily album for each of the kids along with that. We also found out this week that Caleb had been given one of the narrator parts for our Christmas Eve production at church, which means I need to schedule in some daily practice time for him.
To see what other families have done this week, check out the Weekly Wrap-up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.
