The Thoughtful Spot

Monday, September 7, 2009

Our First Week of School

The first week of school is already over! We took our time getting into the new school year. I think everyone is glad to be back into a routine, after a very busy summer. We rearranged the entire house, except the kitchen, which got some new coats of paint. The only piece of furniture in the house that didn’t move is the piano! We are still getting our new school nook organised, but everyithing is settling into place. Gabriel used his new toolbox to help fix our whiteboard.

Our little handyman.

I want to empasise notebooks more this year. We will do most of our academics in the morning, and the girls can spend some time working on their notebooks in the afternoon. Especially important, of course, are our Nature Notebooks. I’ve managed to collect a few printable notebook pages, and I purchased a pretty set for copywork from Notebookpages.com. I debated about whether to use pre-printed sheets or just have them draw and make their own, but I finally decided to at least begin this way. I don’t want to get carried away with themed sheets, but I’d like for them to have a neat, organised and atractive way to record information. Eventually, I plan to move away from printed sheets and they will be doing their own notebooks on plain paper.

We started working through “Une méthode de lecture pour tous les enfants”, by Marie-Christine Olivier. For the first term, we are working on French word-building (phonics). We reviewed the pure vowel sounds for a-u-i-o-e and é. It is a good book and very user friendly, although there are a few things I don’t like about it. Silent letters are printed in a different colour, and also, since it is from France, sometimes we don’t pronounce phonemes the same way. That isn’t a big problem; it’s most often just amusing. Katja loves to say “bulles” the French way! They wrote a word or two representing each letter sound and drew a picture in their notebooks, using a page from NotebookingPages.com.

Lissa

Katja

For Nature Study we began a year-Long journal of a tree in our yard. Katja chose the crabapple tree on the front lawn. We took bark rubbings and leaf rubbings, and next week we will look at the fruit and seeds. We will come back to the tree in each season to observe and paint it. Our nature study focus this term is trees and fruit.

Rebecca

And Rebecca, collector of all creepy-crawlers, found a big green caterpillar.

Annalissa has moved up to Form IA (grade 2) and now does mostly the same work as Katja. The first time I took out Pigrim’s Progress, she said, “Oh, I’m not ready for Chrisitan!” She didn’t want to narrate the first couple of readings, but in the end she did fine.

We were all excited to order some books from Sweden this year, and all the children helped to choose. This week, we began reading, translating and narrating the book, “En liten stund” by Anna-Clara Tidholm. It’s a cute book about a “kaninpojken” (boy bunny) who needs someone to come help him eat up all his pancakes. Anything with pancakes is popular with my little boy: his answer to the question, “What should we have for supper?” is always “Pancakes!”

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About Me

"It is much to be wished that thoughtful mothers would more often keep account of the methods they employ with their children, with some definite note of the success of this or that plan." - Charlotte Mason.