Spring-Summer Schedule

The boys did their annual testing last week which means we are now enjoying a new daily routine.  We will continue homeschooling through the summer with a focus on reading, math and nature/science. 

We always start our days with 'Morning Cards' which is an old name for our morning routine from years ago.  The same activities still get done - get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth and feed the animals - but we no longer have the cards to remind them what to do next. 

After Morning Cards we have ten minutes of Silent Reading for all of us.  Before this week, the boys did not have any requirement for reading to themselves.  I love to think that one day we can start our mornings with an hour of Silent Reading.  That seems such a peaceful and inspiring way to start one's day, sipping tea on the porch with the birds' chatter as our background noise.  Ahhhh.

We try to do our individual lessons in the morning, before the day gets away from us.  I work with each boy on learning to read and on math.  We just started a new math program this week and Armand has been exclaiming all week how much he loves math.  The program, Math-U-See, was recommended by the woman who did their testing.  So far it is working better than anything I've tried before!  It is 'mastery' based as opposed to 'spiral' which was what we had been using.  This means one topic is presented and taught thoroughly before a new topic is introduced.  The whole first book (supposedly a year of work) is single digit addition and subtraction.  The second book is multi-digit addition and subtraction.  If all goes well, I hope to finish both books by the fall of 2014 so they will be starting the multiplication book at the start of 3rd grade.  We are also working our way through a course called Living Math Through History which involves me reading aloud to the boys from a variety of books about how math came to be.

For learning to read they use All About Reading.  They are near the beginning of Level 2 and will be finished with it right around the time Level 3 is released in the fall.  Armand raves about this program and I do too since he is doing so well with it.  He shows signs of having dyslexia but since starting this program five months ago, his reading ability has gone from not reading at all to reading at grade level.  Elio was reluctant for formal lessons all this year and preferred to teach himself to read.  That worked to some extent; he was reading much better than Armand a few months ago but his progress hasn't been consistent.  Elio asked to started of All About Reading recently and I'm sure it will be good for him.

Our nature-science study will focus on monarch butterflies, local birds and nocturnal animals.  We're going to see an IMAX film about monarchs this coming week and then will read 'An Extraordinary Life', a book about the monarch migration that I adored reading to Noah so long ago.  We are making a butterfly garden and are buying two monarch eggs to hatch into a caterpillar and then a butterfly.  We will be creating a silk painting of a butterfly using a DVD from the Creating a Masterpiece series.  I've heard such good things about this series and I can't wait to try it. 

We are selecting a bird each week from my list of 30 that I mentioned in my goals post.  Last week we started with the Eastern Towhee.  We read the chapter about towhees in The Burgess Bird Book for Children, listened to their calls online, talked about the towhee nest we found in our yard a few years ago, and demonstrated their funny way of pulling up leaves to find bugs.  The boys would look and listen to them when we were outside and we found several last week.  We still need to draw a picture of a towhee in our nature journal and write some sentences about what we have learned.  I have several books about birds I have selected to read over the summer: An Owl in the House: A Naturalist's Diary, Adopted by an Owl, The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds, Nests, Birds and Eggs, and we'll re-read the biographies The Boy Who Drew Birds: A Story of John James Audubon and For the Birds: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson. I've though of getting the Birding by Ear CD but I haven't decided on this yet.  We have three pairs of birds nesting in our yard right now - bluebirds, cardinals and Carolina wrens - so we have plenty to keep us engaged and learning and will focus on one of these each of the next three weeks.

And lastly for nocturnal animals I plan to read a sweet late-19th century book called Among the Night People.  We will take time to catch fire flies, try to attract some moths with a bait made in our kitchen and take a few night walks to listen to the night sounds.  We have a pair of barred owls nesting nearby and I would love to figure out exactly where they are.  We hear them calling during the night, sometimes right in our yard it sounds like, and Elio has woken to listen to them a few times.