Thursday, Friday, Saturday

Thursday - We normally have choir in the morning and the do stations in the afternoon because I am too lazy to really do school, but no choir this day, so we just had a regular day.

Read Aloud - Russia - stories about Baba Yaga, fin
Writing, etc. - wrote letters to the girls' friend in Colorado using proper letter writing format and addressing the envelope
Math
Reading

Friday

Read Aloud topic - Russia - more Russian legends, Snow Princess, Sea King's Daughter
Spelling - quizzed on week's words
Writing - freewriting
Math
Reading

Saturday

Kali's birthday party - We went to a trampoline place called Jump On It (PE?)

Went to see Shakespeare's Pericles on campus. The library's summer interactive theater program did this play and Kali got to be in it, so it was fun to go see a production of it. This was meant for kids and was condensed to an hour, but used mostly Shakespeare's language. It was very good.

Wednesday, 9/24

Read Aloud Topic - Russia, Talked about why so many Jews immigrated from Russia and read 2 picture books about Jews in/from Russia. we had read a bunch of books about immigrants this summer after going to an Ellis Island reenactment on the 4th of July and many of the books were about Jews from Russia. I had my genius husband explain why so many Jews left Russia and then talked about it with the girls this morning before reading the books

Grammar - abbreviations and types of sentences

Writing - cursive copywork. Kali is using Handwriting without Tears and Sierra is copying from a regular book, but transferring it into cursive.

Math

No time for reading time. We had art class from 1 - 2:30pm.

Piano and Violin practice. No Typing today.

Tuesday, September 24th

Ok, it's not technically Tuesday anymore, but this is what we accomplished today (yesterday?):

Read Aloud Topic - Russia continued. Today was books about matroishka dolls

Spelling - made the older 3 girls study their words and quiz each other. They did not enjoy this... I am going through Rebecca Sitton's "no excuse" list before moving on to individualized lists.

Writing - dictation for Siera and copy work for Kali. I am just starting to do dictation with Sierra she is doing pretty well. Kali did not want to do dictation. She thought it would be too hard. She is not quite 8, so I will let her do copywork instead for a while longer.

Math

Reading - silent reading for the older 2 and phonics for my youngest. Teaching Arwen to read is proving to be a huge test of my paitence. "No, look at the sound. Don't randomly guess while looking around the room..."

Piano practice for Sierra, Lesson for Kali

Violin practice for Kali

Made cards for great -grandma who has been in the hospital

Weekly chores

Activity Day at Church for Sierra

Monday, September 22nd

Read Aloud/ Topic - We are doing a mini geography unit on Russia. Last year we spent a lot of time studying the cultures of the world via picture books. We didn't get to Russia or the Middle East, so we are finish that up this year before we start our United States studies.
We had a good time this morning reading about and discussing Russia . I got to find out all that my children know about Russia thanks to watching Time Warp Trio. And we had an especially good time looking through a book about The last Russian czar's youngest daughter, Anastasia. We have the Disney movie, Anastasia, but I had no idea that the movie was (very loosely) based on a true story. It was fun discussing how Disney took real facts and changed them around to make their movie.

Grammar - Quotation Marks
Writing - typing stories that they already wrote and edited
Math - Kali - multiplication
Sierra - decimals
Reading time/Phonics for Arwen

Now I am off to take Kali to her violin lessons. While Kali is at her lesson I will be giving Sierra her piano lesson. I am not a skilled teacher, but since we couldn't afford lessons this year, I decided to just help Sierra and Kali continue on in their books from last year.

Catching up - the first 3 weeks

We started school the Tuesday after Labor Day. At first it made sense to start that day because my husband started back teaching at the University that day and also it gave us a full week to recover from our trip to Ohio to visit my family. But really it was kind of a busy week to get focused on school. Monday being Labor day gave us a 4 day week. Wednesday we had a Homeschool group meeting in the afternoon, so we had to scramble to get school done that day. Our Thursday morning choir started that week and a homeschool picnic was held on Friday starting at 10:30, so Friday was a no school day. For our read aloud/topic time I just read some books for our own collection that I had been meaning to read and we did math and copywork both Tuesday and Wednesday and grammar and spelling one day each.

The following week we started our Weather Unit, which included bunches of books from the library and an experiment kit. It took us 2 weeks to get through everything. Most days we did math and some kind of writing and we alternated days of grammar and spelling.

Other activities of the first 3 weeks of school included art class, storytelling theater, math club, tamale making, and of course, park day.

Oh, I should mention that the week before we "officially" started school, we went to the $2 day at the Dinosaur Museum and Botanical Gardens and also the local Storytelling festival.

Welcome to Behind the Mess

I have created this blog as a way for me to keep records of our daily homeschool activities. I figured this might be boring for any "regular" people reading my blog, so I set up this new blog. Any homeschool blog junkies like myself can feel free to read about our daily activities here and steal any ideas you like.