Our Week in Review

We are slowly settling into our new school rhythm.  I say "new" because each year is new and different than the one before.  Our weekly studies are a combination of work we do for mom and work we do for co-op classes, but history remains our "spine."  This week was kindof interesting because I combined three weeks of our Year 3 Tapestry of Grace curriculum into one discussion.  We wrapped up our reading of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, learned about the push for independence in South American countries, and studied President Monroe and his famous speech which became known as the "Monroe Doctrine."

Whew!

Three days this week we just sat in the family room and read history books together.  Much of our high schoolers' work is rigorous and intense, so it is nice to be able to just sit and read with each other sometimes, and spontaneously share what we are reading about.  I love that as a homeschool mom I have control over the curriculum, and not the other way around!

Before discussion today I prepared a lunch of some foods that Lewis and Clark would have eaten on their long journey west to the Pacific Ocean (beef jerky and sausage, which they would have made from buffalo intestines, but we just bought at Kroger!), as well as a traditional Chilean food called stuffed empanadas.  For the empanada recipe, go here.  We ate, we read, we talked.  Delightful!

It was hard keeping the dogs away from our food, haha!

Science and foreign language classes are all taken at our co-op now, but I am still the primary English teacher for all my boys, and I absolutely love doing IEW writing with Little Man!  He is working on a narrative story of King Arthur and doing a fabulous job.  He is quite a good writer already! 

He is also doing IEW's "Fix It" this year, where every day he fixes a sentence or two that has deliberate spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors, and then rewrites the correct version in his best cursive handwriting.  By the end of the year he will have an entire story, perfectly edited and written out by hand!  Fix It spans five years (six now, but my old version only has five), so he has four more stories to do after this one.   Here is a sample of his corrected Fix It writing from this week.  He is working on "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer":

This weekend we are looking forward to two soccer games, painting a bedroom, and singing in a worship choir this Sunday.  What are you looking forward to this weekend?