Weekly Wrap-up ~ First Week of School 2011-2012

For Bible I was not sure what we were doing, even on the first day of school I was not sure. I had thought I would do a study of the heart from the Bible that I was making up as I went. Day one I read a part of a chapter from my book Instructing a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp. On Tuesday I had them look up a couple words in the concordance and fill out a Bible study sheet and my son Nathan told me he was not getting anything out of our study. So Tuesday I started looking for something else to do. I found the Book of Virtues study that I had downloaded a while back and decided to do that. On Tuesday or Wednesday I got another review product for TOS. We will be reviewing Rooted and Grounded  from Deeper Roots. That will be our Bible for this year... it looks really good! The boys will keep doing the Virtues study as part of Building Life Relationships - character building is so important and my boys could use some more of it.

For History we are continuing our study where we left off last year we are finishing up the 1600's. This week we covered John Locke and the witchcraft in Salem, MA.

For Historical Fiction we started reading: A Jacobite Exile by G.A. Henty. This Henty was exciting from the very first chapter. We are all enjoying it. See my Read-Aloud Thursday post for more info.

For Science we are doing a new curriculum from Answers in Genesis. For details about the whole curriculum please see my Resources for the 2011-2012 School Year page. For this week we read chapter 1 of Evolution Exposed: Earth Science and  the first 5 chapters of Laying a Creation Foundation: Building Blocks in Science.

Today we viewed our first science movie for this curriculum - Unlocking the Mystery of Life. It was really detailed and well done. I learned a lot... I think the boys did too.

For Language Arts this year the boys are doing Movies as Literature. My daughters, Rachel and Jessica, did this same curriculum in 2003-4. We really like this curriculum from Bright Ideas Press. It is great for teaching skills in analyzing... this time of movies, not books... and the essays are challenging also. Thanks to IEW last year the boys are solid on their essay writing and this will expand and perfect those skills. The first movie, which we viewed and did the discussion questions for this week, was Shane. The boys had never seen this movie, we got it from the library because we don't own it. The boys like it so much they want to own it. So far so good with this study.

Besides these main subjects one or both of the boys are doing Geometry, Easy Grammar, Reading books they (sometimes I) choose, Home and Life Management, Educational Foundations, Building Life Relationships, Computer, Phys. Ed., Health, Artist Study, Composer Study, Hymn Study,  and Poetry. I will give more details about these "extra" subjects in the weeks to come.


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