As for this week, we took a snow day– about 2 inches of snow that was gone in a couple of days. OK, to be perfectly honest, the snow day was for me, not them. We spent another morning building a huge blanket fort in which to do school (you know, rather than actually doing school) and played more Wii than we should have. Made some Valentines and wrote pen pal letters. Played with geography cards I got at the Target dollar spot. Chased some rabbit trails about longest living animals (it’s the giant tortoise, by the way, but did you know a swan can live over a hundred years? And great horned owls almost seventy?) Laughed till we cried at silly youtube cat videos. Princepesa spent the week drawing and coloring a fashion collection of all the dresses Laura wore in the different Little House books. I had to laugh because it’s a sign how many times she has read those books – she was accurate down to details about boots and buttons.

Oh, and we did do some school work.

Princepesa – Second Grade

Viking- PreK

Together

I’ve also been thinking about where she needs to be by the end of second grade in order to move into third grade work. In my mind this mostly involves doing more of her own writing. Right now she dictates all of her narrations and I do the writing, and I also do the writing for grammar. My goal is to have her writing her answers to grammar assignments and most of her own narrations by the end of this school year.

History – this is an easy one. We’ve done Story of the World 1, are doing 2 now, and will do 3 next year. We’ll do SOTW 4 for her fourth grade year, and then go to Tapestry of Grace for our remaining cycles through history.

Grammar – another easy one. Rod & Staff grammar has been perfect for us and we’ll stick with it for the long haul.

Bible – we’ve enjoyed the Explorer’s Bible study and will do the NT survey next year. It’s hard to find a systematic, expository Bible study for this age and this fits the bill perfectly.

Math - Horizons Math has finally helped us to find our groove and I’m hoping to finish level 2 by the end of this year so we will be able to start level 3 on time next year. I try to find the balance between moving her through the work and moving at a pace that allows her to master the material, so we’ll see if we achieve that. Right now I plan to stay with Horizons through level 6 for her.

Latin - we just started a combination of Prima Latina and Minimus in the last couple of weeks. Song School Latin was fun, and when I let her set the pace, she buzzed through it. She’s doing fine on PL for now, but I’m not sure if progressing to Latina Christiana I in third grade will be too difficult or if she’ll be able to do it. We’ll play this by ear and see where we end up.

Spelling - she’s a natural speller, so I just have her doing Spelling Workout. The thing is it feels so much like busy work – she rarely misspells a word and all I have to do it point it out and she gets it and moves on. I think a lot of that is because she reads so much, but I was always an intuitively good speller and I think she just is too. So I debate between just dropping spelling and addressing it as it comes up in her narrations and writing, going to vocabulary study, trying a different spelling curriculum like Spelling Wisdom, or just sticking with SWO. Oy. I have books D and E already, so we’ll go through those and then I will be forced to make a decision.

So -  there ends the easy choices.

Writing - we’ve done WWE 1 and are doing 2 now. It’s not something that we jump up and down about, but we don’t hate it either, and I think she’s making progress. I can tell that she is better at holding longer dictations in her mind as she writes them, and is getting better at summarizing rather than repeating the story back word for word.

We’re in Classical Conversations and I could put her in Essentials next year. I do think she could do the work, but have been wrestling with whether IEW is what we want to use for writing. After a lot of research, and several long discussions with my husband, I think we’re going the progymnasmata route, rather than the IEW route. We’ll use Writings Tales 1 and 2, then go to Classical Writing – Homer for 5th grade.

Science - We’ve never done science well or systematically. I think that’s mostly my fault, but still – I need to do better. We do read plenty of library books and they do science memory work and experiments through Classical Conversations. My debate here is between just doing a reading/nature study/science kit approach to science for a couple more years or finding a formal science curriculum that works for us. I wish there was a SOTW for science, but alas, I am not the one to create one.

I’ve looked at so many options – Noeo, Easy Classical schedules, and God’s Design for Science series. At one point I was sure we were going to do Singapore’s My Pals Are Here. Bottom line? I really need to find a science that allows us to read from a book, read some extra library books, do a notebook page or two, and move on. Complicated experiments just won’t happen. Another oy and a head slap.

How complicated can I make this?

Princepesa – Second Grade

Language Arts
Spelling	Spelling Workout D – Lessons 2-3
Writing	Writing with Ease 2, Week 20
Grammar	R&S Grammar 2, Lessons 4-5 – 4-8
Math
Horizons Math 2	Lessons 12-15
	We took last week and this week to really drill on addition facts. I don’t feel like she has them memorized well enough yet and since math is a weaker subject for her, I don’t want to move on until this is a little stronger. We played a lot of RightStart math games and did a lot of Flashmaster drills, etc. Timed drills give her a panic attack so I pushed her on that this week too.
Latin
Prima Latina	Lesson 2 This is the first week we ran into pronunciation issues associated with graduating from Song School Latin to Prima Latina. The word caelum was in her vocab list for this week, and she’d already learned it in SSL, but with the other pronunciation. We just talked about the differences and went on, and she seemed OK with that. I’m doing a schedule with two weeks of Prima Latina and one week of Minimus. I think PL is strong on vocab and grammar, but Minimus has much more historical context and Roman cultural information. Next week is our first Minimus week and I’m wondering how it will go.
Bible
God’s Promises	Lessons 16-3  – 17-1
Reading
	Not a lot of extra reading this week since we spent our days rushing off to something else. She did plenty of bedtime reading, but I didn’t record it. Probably read On the Banks of Plum Creek for the eighty-seventh time.

Viking- PreK

Together

Viking- PreK

Together

Language Arts

Math

Latin

Bible

History

Science

Memory Work

Classical Conversations Cycle 1 Week 15.

Reading

Language Arts

Math

Latin

Bible

History

Science

Memory Work

Classical Conversations Cycle 1 Week 14.

Reading

And now we are off for a field trip to the aquarium at the City Museum.

Well, we have a new t-o-o-l in our home. Let me introduce you to this marvel…

We have stalled on this for a long time. Frankly, I am anti-game system. In a serious way. I grew without a television even, and it irks me to no end to see kids connected to a phone/DS/videogame wherever they go. I wanna holler “put that down and talk to someone!”(A side note: read Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax for a disturbing commentary of video game use among boys and its long term results.)

But then that’s very insensitive of me and besides it’s none of my business what other parents allow their children to do. Our kids have just always known that they will never, ever, have a video game system or DS.

Ahem. Ok – that’s the back story. This Christmas we discussed for a long time the balance between pie-in-the-sky standards and well-balanced, homeschooled children. In the end we decided to purchase a Wii system for our family with the understanding that we would be very deliberate about the games we purchased and how much time we spent playing with it.

SO.

School used to take hours and hours because a certain child o’ mine can drag things out to unbelievable lengths. The Wii is now my uber-bribe. I grabbed a handful of plastic coins from our play money stash and a “Wii token” is awarded for each school subject they complete in the time limit. I set the timer for each subject, depending on the content and their aptitude in that subject. Math gets thirty minutes, spelling gets ten, Latin gets ten, and so on. At the end of all the school work they buy Wii time from me. Each token is worth five minutes, and they usually earn about thirty minutes of playing time. Thirty minutes of running and swinging and jumping and laughing.

We are finishing our work in almost half the time it used to take us, mommy is becoming sane again, and we haven’t cried through school in days. Neither of us.

The thing is, at first it was all about the Wii time. Each token that was awarded made them recalculate how much time they had earned and it was a rush to get done and get to playing. As days have gone on, though, it seems the habit of doing school promptly and easily is taking the place of the habit of school being drawn out and painful. It’s not about the Wii anymore and I’m so thrilled.

Half an hour of Wii time for three hours of school work, and then the whole afternoon for each of us to do whatever we want? That is, in my opinion, worth every penny.

For this coming school year we have made a few changes. First, we are doing Classical Conversations this year and all three of us (four, actually, if you count Daddy) are very excited about it. We’ll be doing the Foundations program on Mondays.

I also decided to switch to Rod & Staff grammar for this year. I had no complaints about Growing with Grammar last year, but it just didn’t feel as substantial as I wanted it to be, and since it’s one of her stronger subjects, I thought I should push her a little more. It’s my impression that R&S is a bit more thorough. We did add light Latin this year as well.

So here’s our second grade plan:

• Explorers Bible Study (God’s Promises – OT Overview)
• Horizons Math 2
• Rod & Staff Grammar
• Spelling Workout
• Writing with Ease 2
• Story of the World 2 (Middle Ages – my favorite period of history! I’m excited.)
• Christian Kids Explore Earth & Space
• Song School Latin

One other thing that I am excited about – the latest homeschooling craze: workboxes. Iif you are not familiar with them, here’s a thorough overview of what’s out there. Consider yourself warned.

I had already been mulling on a way to help Princepesa begin to work more independently and to see what she had left to do. She’s a very visual person, so the system should be a good fit for her. I like it because it will serve to keep me accountable. As another mom said, nothing like a pile of empty boxes staring you in the face to make you get tomorrow’s school day ready. I also think it will be a good way to incorporate all those fun things or ideas you find at conventions or blog surfing but never actually get around to doing. I’ll do another post in the future showing how I set up our boxes and what’s going in them.

So we’re all ready for second grade. We won’t start for another couple of weeks, but it’s all set. For now we’re going swimming.

Viking: WAIT! STOP! (Speaking way too loudly because he’s excited)
I think I saw Egypt!

Princepesa: (after looking where he was pointing)
No, that’s just South Dakota.

Language Arts

Math

History

Science

Memory Work

Reading

You can see a list of everything we read by checking our Goodreads shelf.

Projects

(You can see more photos of our school work on our school’s photo gallery.)

We checked in on our chicken mummy named Pharoah Chicken-kamen. You can see photos in our photo gallery.

We made a Sumerian seal for our history project (carried over from last week). We also made a model of a ziggurat.

We also started some Valentine’s Day decorating and crafts.