Fall term: Week Two notes

This past week we added Block 2 (exciting name, I know) to our morning schedule.  This follows the Bible and Math/Maggie's Mommy time and 15 minute or so break of Block 1.  Block 2 includes Morning Time (MT) and a 15 minute break and goes for about an hour total.

Morning time is not my invention.  I first heard about it on Sarah Mackenzie's blog Amongst Lovely Things, and she credits Cindy Rollins from Morning Time Moms.  I liked the idea of setting aside a time to meet together to do the things that might usually get pushed aside in our homeschool day even though they are things that are either important to me or bringing beauty or interest into our days.

My plan of what to put in our MT has gone through endless revisions and will probably continue to be revised as needed.  I initially wanted to loop through a number of things, but have decided that, since one of my goals this year is to simplify and dig deeper in our learning time, I needed to simplify MT content.

Here is MT currently:
Daily: Start with reading one or two poems from Read Aloud Poems--Edited by Glorya Hale
Loop:
Latin (Prima Latina for RJ and AG)
Science Read Aloud (Apologia Anatomy for Young Explorers)
Latin
Shakespeare
Science RA

The idea is to practice Latin everyday and to read from our Science book everyday.  On the days without Shakespeare, we spend a little more time on Latin, either learning new words and concepts or playing review games like Fiddlesticks or Race to the Colosseum.

Ideally we will read poems to start and then move onto Latin each day and end with Science.  The nice thing about putting our subjects on a loop is that if Latin and Shakespeare take up the whole time, we can start with the Science RA the next day and not miss out on it.  This helps me not to feel like we have to rush if we are really enjoying something.

For Science we are just reading from the book and narrating back what they can remember.  We may or may not do the experiments and extras.  We will continue to include science for this seven-week term (until the middle of October).  Next term we'll replace science with a composer study (Mozart)/artist study (Renoir) combo, I think.

Shakespeare is a combination of reading one or two retellings for children and memorizing passages from that play.  Currently we are studying A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I read E. Nesbit's Shakespeare Stories for Young Readers version and will start Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare version this week.  It's a bit longer and has more details, so I thought it would be good to read both.  I are using Ken Ludwig's How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare to help guide us in understanding and memorizing some passages from the plays.

So far the older girls really like Latin.  They aren't crazy about the science.  I might end up looking for some library books instead.  We'll try it this term and re-evaluate as needed.

MA's Mommy time this week:
--ABC activity--Chicka Chicka Boom Boom--we organized all the magnetic upper and lower case letters in alphabetical order and then read through CCBB using a cute printout we put up on the magnetic white board.  It took a long time for her to organize the letters with my help, but I tried to not worry about the length of time.  We worked for 25 minutes and then left it to finish up later.

--Read Aloud day--I can't remember what we read.

Other activity--Playdough--Always a big hit.  I took out the printouts in page protectors that have shapes on them.  We rolled dough snakes and tried to make the shapes.  She also just played.

MA tries to make a heart shape with playdough

CN gets in on the playdough action

We also did our Sonlight Core C read alouds.  I can't say that I'm excited about many of the read alouds yet, but we have some good ones coming up.  We also used the Fiddlesticks game to practice state capitals while waiting for our table at the restaurant on Saturday.  I only included half the states right now.