During the last few months,  we have not  done much with History or Science.  We have done bits and pieces here and there but not anything of any consistent value.   With the beginning of a new month,  I decided  that I wanted to start back  with our original plans.    In a perfect world,  we would be starting  Knights  and Castles  for the first two weeks  then would be moving  on to  Shakespeare.  So I decided to pretend  that we were, indeed,  in that perfect world  and start with my original plans.   We may not get very far  or as deep as I had originally intended  but at least  we are doing something  productive.

      Yesterday was our first day  on this subject.   We read  The Sword in the Circle  by Rosemary Sutcliff.  This book is  about  Merlin and King Arthur.   The kids  have been making  King Arthur's  castle out of lego  the past few days  so this book will give them a great jumping off point for their  play.  

      We  did alot of reading yesterday about knights and  just exactly who they were and what they did.  I have  a few Usborne  books  as well as a Kaleidoscope  book  on knights and castles  that  give us our information.   I really like  using  Story of the World  as our spine  for these units  but it doesn't have very much  info  on this  part of history  so I have needed to look elsehwere.  Elsewhere isn't as well-written  to garner outlines or narrations from.   But we plod on.

      Each child  then did  a narration   about what we had read.   This is where things went south.  Missy's narration was fine  because I write hers out  but Rocky had great difficulty  with his writing.   He left out a few sentences  so I made him do it over again.  This did not sit well with him  and  a hissy fit  followed.  I gave him a break (aka sent him to his room)  and we started again  but it was very difficult for him to get those few sentences out.   It  hit me, yet again,  that  this boy needs consistency  with his school work  and he just hasn't been getting it  the past little while.   He needs to be writing every day  for whatever reason.   So this is my goal  for the next few months:  do copywork or writing narrations  daily.

      I had Mia write out a paragraph  about how the knights  and castles  came to be.  This was difficutl to do  as the sources we used are not written very well.   She managed, though,  with alot of help from me.  Her writing is pretty bad as well,  so I guess consistency  is needed with her, too.   

      Even with the few little bumps  yesterday,  it did feel good  to be doing something other than math and reading.  It felt very good indeed.

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Posted by Juliainsk