August Recap

Here's a quick recap of a few of our school activities in August. I am really pleased with most of our curriculum. I have had to tweak our Language Arts quite a bit, but we both like what we're doing now. Math has been focusing on geometry, graphing, addition facts, and calendar skills. We also do journaling and handwriting each day. We do either History or Science each day, and he has a fun Weekly Reader on Friday. He learns a new Bible verse each week, and of course we have snack, storytime, and centers each day. It makes for quite a full morning!

Sonlight (our curriculum) is really strong in History, and Andrew is loving their approach. They spiral their teaching over three year periods. So this year, we're focusing on an introduction to World Cultures in History. Each week we focus on a different topic. So far, we've studied early man, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome, the Vikings (a huge hit!), and the Middle Ages. For each civilization, we learn about what they wore, what they ate, how they traveled, and how they lived.

The week we studied Ancient Rome, we learned about togas and that they ate on the floor reclining on pillows. We also learned that they thought it was good manners to burp out loud after a meal. (Hilarious to the five year old.) When I told Andrew that Jesus lived during the time of the Ancient Romans, he said, "Well. I bet HE never burped out loud after a meal!" We ended that week by eating our Friday night pizza on the living room floor with pillows and wearing our fire truck sheet togas.




Science has also been introducing lots of topics. We've studied weather, landforms, the ocean, and some earth science. One day we studied fossils, so the boys went outside and picked some leaves and things to make imprints into some salt dough. Here they are putting pressure on their fossils.


The week we studied weather happened to be a big week in New Jersey. Aunt Mer Mer and Uncle Roger experienced a pretty big earthquake and a hurricane in just a few days. (We keep telling them they just need to move away from there. Some people can't take a hint!) So Andrew called Aunt Mer Mer and interviewed her about the earthquake. He was very interested in what Major thought of the whole thing.

And of course, we had to explode a volcano since we were studying about them!


We even had molten lava cakes for dessert that night!