One of new year’s resolutions is to blog more here! (If you didn’t know, I manage two other blogs – and while I would love to blog about Homeschool all day everyday, this blog is not paying the bills. So I have to devote a good portion of my time to Saving Toward A Better Life. BUT if I don’t start making THIS blog relevant and interesting, then it will never start paying the bills..so…here we go!)
I figure the best way to actually getting around to getting our Week in Review posts up on Friday is to open it in my editor on Mondays and add to it all week long. So that’s what I’ve been doing with this post.
Monday is our co-op day. This week was our second co-op day of the spring term. We LOVE our co-op. I plan on writing soon about what makes a co-op great. I truly think ours is the greatest. I can’t think of anything that would make it better. We have over 80 families totaling nearly 250 people. We have great classes (BigG is taking Spanish this term! Yes we have a Spanish class for 1st & 2nd graders!) Two weeks of Spanish and he already knows all the colors, numbers to 10 and about a half a dozen animals. Foreign Language is not my strong suit so I’m excited!
While I’m talking about co-op, just before Christmas break our co-op had a Literature Fair. I was nervous about signing up for this because BigG hates writing and I knew this would require a lot of it. But we had plenty of time to work on it so we could break it up into manageable chunks and I knew it would be good for him.
I don’t want to make this post insanely long so if you want to read about the Literature Fair Project on the Titanic – you can do so over here in a separate post. But as you can see, it was very good for him! I was SUPER proud of his 3rd place ribbon – he was the youngest kid to submit a project AND there were some good ones he was up against! (He even placed ahead of the kid who did a project on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and actually made homemade chocolate candies for the judges!)
It’s been so long since I’ve written about what we’re up too. We’re still using Sonlight and are a little over halfway through Core A. (We started week 18 on Wednesday of this week.)
We started Apologia Swimming Creatures after Christmas (after finishing up an abbreviated run-through of Flying Creatures (which is the Zoology 1 course). We started Zoology 1 this time last year and scratched the surface of it – BigG was only 6 so I pared it down to what was interesting and appropriate for him. But since he LOVES ocean animals I plan to stretch Zoology 2 over the next year and a half by taking it slow (sometimes what they have listed to do in a day in the plan is a little much for him) and adding lots of extras.
I’ve made a YouTube playlist of Swimming Creature videos where I’ve been adding videos that go along with our lessons. We’ve only been through wales and dolphins so far but I will keep adding to it so far. We have thoroughly enjoyed using YouTube to watch these amazing creatures!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udm2YjKPKsE]
We also just started Singapore Math 2A. Last year for 1st grade we used BJU Math 1. We didn’t get all the way through it (the last chapter and some of the optional “going further” lessons scattered through the book). So we spent to first part of this year doing that. And then did Singapore Math 1B just to make sure he was on par to switch to Singapore. He’s doing great in math. I like how Singapore tries to keep it uncomplicated. It seems to be just right for him at the moment. I have 2B, 3A and 3B (I scored BIG at a book sale last summer!) so I plan to work through all those and then have him take a placement test for Teaching Textbooks. Math is not my favorite so I know we will reach a point where I’m going to need help teaching him (and I know that point will come well before high school!) so Teaching Textbooks is definitely on my radar for that!
I think that catches us up! Thanks to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for having a weekly wrap-up every week!
