Maybe we should call ourselves the Mayberry Homeschool instead of DoeHill.   We are huge fans of the show. I refuse to put my children's real names or pictures on the blog, and I'm a little tired of using "DD" for "Dear Daughter"  and DS for "Dear Son" . So, they have suggested using their favorite Andy Griffith Show characters as "codenames" in Mommy's writing. So, here they are, Thelma Lou and Earnest T. Bass. While ETB may not be the image I would have selected for my son, he thought it was very funny.   To please them, I'll use Thelma Lou and Earnet T. Bass for this post only. "DD" and "DS" are easier, if not as funny...

 After a week off workbooks while hubby was on vacation, we are now back to the regular day schedule.

Over breakfast we read a couple of chapters in Exodus. We are using Rob and Cyndy Shearer's The Greenleaf Guide to the Old Testament this year and love it.  Ordered daily readings, oral discussion questions, and lots of flexibility make this curriculum a winner. We sometimes supplement with free Calvary Chapel pages or projects of our own. We are making our own felt Bible pages for major stories. That's where the glue-y mess that is now my daughter's work table happened. Tomorrow we'll be making some unleavened bread for our Passover section. Like I say, we aren't as creative as some, but it works for us.

Thelma Lou read her 2nd real book today--Green Eggs and ham. She is so proud!  Earnest T.  completed four lessons in A Beka math today, read half of The Drinking Gourd, scored 90 on his Spelling Workout pretest, finished a page in A Beka Grammar 4, and is now dancing like a loon to a music tape of multiplication facts from Twin Sisters. Yep, that's my little Earnest T.!

We will finish the Bob Jones first grade history book for Thelma Lou tomorrow. We only used the textbook and supplemented it with read alouds for each section like Squanto, If You Sailed on the Mayflower, Jamestown, and alsoD'Aulaire history books.  We rely heavily on picture narration and oral narration rather than workbook pages for history subjects.

We also read 9 poems aloud by Rudyard Kipling today. I'm ashamed to say it was the first time I'd read his poem "If" .  The book we used [see Kipling link above] is delightfully illustrated. While we may not be keeping striclty with the original plan I had for our poetry section, they are being consistently exposed to great works. We've read from Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Ogden Nash, William Wordsworth, and now Kipling. 

For phonics I've used Christian Liberty Press's Adventures in Phonics with both children, AlphaPhonics by Blumenfeld, flash cards from A Beka, and easy readers I've picked up along the way.

Earnest T. read Beowulf this summer for fun. Yep, hard to believe, especially since I didn't read until i was in college and even then it wasn't the whole thing! The things an 8 year old homeschooling Andy Griffith Show fan can do! That's what I leave books around the house for--so the kids will read.