Weekly Wrap-up week ending 08/06/10

This was our second week of school. We still have not done our first day of school pictures... is it too late???   I guess I need to do that soon, before we are halfway through school! Actually, I did not take one photo of school this week. Sorry about that. Need to get better at that. Photos of the kids are always well liked. Well on to what we did accomplish this week.

Note: I wanted to add in that if you are interested in knowing what resources we use for school, books not specifically linked here in this post, you will find them listed, linked and have pictures on my resources for 2010 -2011 page... check it out here.

 
In Bible we are covering the beginning of the gospels. This week we saw the beginning of the Lord's ministry including the selection of his disciples.

For History we covered Mary Queen of Scots, William I and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and El Greco. For Kepler the boys read the Kepler Biography from the Sower Series by John H. Tiner. We also did a map of the Hapsburg's from Knowledge Quest's Blackline Maps.

The boys are reading Red Hugh: Prince of Donegal for Historical Fiction. They covered chapter 6-10.

We are doing Physics for Science this year and we covered work, gravity and friction this week, using various resources from our resources page as well as a few books form the library. Today the boys choose science books for individual reading. Christopher read "Magic School Bus: Plays Ball" and "Force, of course!: force and motion" by M. Leontovich." Nathan read Eyewitness "Force and Motion" by Peter Lafferty."

We covered our first lesson of IEW writing class and the boys are actually enjoying writing for the first time ever!!! I love IEW. The first lesson is about taking notes in an outline form and then using the outline to write a story. Lesson 2 is supposed to take 2 more weeks. It is more work on taking notes and the boys are doing great with that so we will do the 2 more stories but will do them both next week.

We are studying Albrecht Durer for Art. For Music we sing as a family and we are practicing for special music at church later this month. We are also studying Beethoven this quarter. We are going to be doing Poetry study this year but I still have to work on that... hopefully this weekend. For this week we did a physics poem, you can find it here from this page. We are also going to do hymn study, that too is still in the works... need to get that planned for next week as well. We do each of these one day a week. That takes up 4 days. On Friday the boys will take turns choosing an educational game. Christopher chose Professor Noggin - Space game this week. Surprisingly, I won... though I used the easy questions along with Christopher and Nathan used the hard questions.

Christopher is doing well with his Teaching Textbook Algebra 1 so far. It is his first time doing Teaching Textbooks. He likes it a lot. He is also doing Typing Tutor 10 and after the summer break is starting from lesson 1 as a review. He is starting at a much better score than last year when he first tried the program. Unfortunately I did not get him doing this soon enough and he has bad "hunt and peck" habits to undo.

Besides the subjects already listed Nathan is reading Home Educating with Confidence by Rick and Marilyn Boyer for Building Life Relationships. He is doing well with the first couple of chapters of Financial Accounting and is continuing to work on Easy Grammar Plus.


We hope to work on fitness and nutrition more this year for the whole family and so the boys will be exercising each week. We need to all get on a more regular schedule with that.


Well, that is about it for week two. Please click the link at the top or here to join us at weird unsocialized homeschoolers and do your own Weekly Wrap-up. Let us know how your homeschool week went.