Our Week in Review, and a new twist on Kindergarten

Last week we had a whirlwind tour through the remainder of Genesis as we read about the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph). Lots of interesting stories and situations in Genesis!! I had to constantly read ahead and did phrase a few things differently for our 8 and 5 year olds. Our older two children are also doing the same reading silently on their own, so they got the whole scoop, including sex, homosexuality, and circumcision just in this week alone!

Our history studies this year have us on a very aggressive Bible reading schedule, but I am determined to do all the Old Testament reading outloud so all our children can hear it. It is an amazing review for me too, and I am learning TONS every day.

Here a few pictures of the children's Bible journals from the last two weeks. This is daughter G's drawing of Noah and the animals coming out of the ark:



The same picture by son C:


And son L:


This is son G's Tower of Babel:


And here is Little Man's! His tower comes complete with cranes. ;-) But notice the talking bubbles coming from the two people at the bottom of the picture. He drew different symbols in each bubble to show that they couldn't understand one another!!


Though I could have spent several whole days on our history/Bible studies, we did do other subjects too. Here is son G working in his Fix It notebook. Have I mentioned how much I love Fix It? On the left you can see the 4 passages he fixes each week. He marks corrections right on the paper using the proper editing symbols, goes over corrections with me, and then re-writes the corrected sentences on the right hand side using his best cursive. This is all we are doing for grammar this year, and though I sometimes worry that I'm not hitting grammar hard enough, if we can accomplish the same learning with less pain, I'm all for it!



Daughter G is a pretty good typist already, but sons G and L are just learning keyboarding this year. Here is L doing his daily typing practice (which he LOVES):


In an ongoing effort to fit quality kindergarten time in with Little Man, I stumbled upon a routine that seems to be working really well for he and I, and that is to do a week's worth of math workbook pages in one day, a week's worth of handwriting workbook pages in one day, and a week's worth of phonics pages in one day. In some ways this goes against my own educational principles of frequent review in small chunks. BUT, he does get math practice, handwriting practice, and phonics practice in other ways on the other days. It's just the workbook pages that we are hitting only once per week.

The reason for this is the workbook pages require me to be right there, teaching and guiding, while he can be more independent doing math or writing related activities on his own. Here we are on "math day" doing all of lesson 5 in his workbook. We are still working on one to one correspondence, number recognition, and learning to write numerals.


And here he is on another day, sorting and counting little plastic fish.



This is a language arts activity he can do on his own that teaches opposites. Each set of two pieces is self correcting because they only fit with each other and not with any other piece.




I'm thankful for all we are learning, and for all the ways God helps me each and every day!