Posted in home schooling
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Our school year is definitely in full swing here at Hilltop. You can always tell by the smell of smoke. Annaleigh is into the 1600s in history, and we have been neck-deep in all the political upheaval in Europe. She is so sick of hearing about Protestants and Catholics and all their skirmishes. It seems everyday we open the book someone is getting beheaded. It seemed a little better when we first began to read about Louis XIV...
...and his grand palace of Versailles, but then we learned that his extravagance was what eventually led to the bloody French Revolution. So, we decided to blow off a little steam, literally, by lighting a match to a model of London one afternoon, thus recreating the Great Fire....
It was taking a bit longer than we anticipated, and we were growing fearful of the neighbors' stares from their windows. Eventually all we had was rubble, thank goodness, and we could go inside to escape any further scrutiny and avoid a visit from our fine police station. I think we really need to live in the country...
Harrison also had his share of violence over the past couple of weeks, as we've been studying the Viking era. Big D's family is Swedish, so he's known for a while that there is some Viking in his blood and was excited to get to his roots. One day we were reading about a Viking group that raided and pillaged an Irish monastery (my roots, by the way), and he looked up from the violence-filled pages, and said, "Do you mean the Vikings were bad?" Well, if you consider murder, stealing, and other unmentionable things bad then, well, yes. He was shocked, a little disappointed, but not enough so to deter him from building a model of a long ship...
That came in our Viking Treasure Chest. I was pretty much convinced we would have had an easier time had we traipsed to a forest and felled our own trees about mid-way through this process, but we finally got it together. I thought we might as well set it on fire too, so great was my frustration, but Harrison vehemently protested. I think it was the Irish in me that wanted revenge. On a much calmer note, Harrison is learning a lot in all of his subjects. Here he's doing a measuring exercise with his worthy computer teacher for Saxon 54...
This has been a big transition year for him in math, and it hasn't been without its bumps, ones that have occasionally brought out the Viking in me. Oh wait...I'm not Swedish. Umm, well, it brings out the Irish in me, I guess. But, I think we are finally getting things figured out and getting into a rhythm with his lessons. Both kids are doing very well with their writing. Here is a two-point expository paragraph that Harrison recently wrote about his two favorite colors.... Two Colors
And then here is a poem that Annaleigh wrote as part of her Painless Poetry course...
For science one day, we were learning about the skin. One little experiment you could do was to draw a caterpillar on the inside of your elbow, which would demonstrate how the skin stretches by watching the caterpillar grow and shrink as you bend it. Well, while Harrison wanted nothing to do with a caterpillar on his arm, he did allow me to draw a fiercer, sort of, looking snake...
Ta-da! Annaleigh continues to do very well at her tutorial class of Apologia's general science. She has a report on a scientist coming up, which I'm a little worried that she's procrastinating on, but I'm trying to bite my tongue. It's on Ptolemy I, who I think is the one who had it all wrong about the Solar System. Maybe I'll just do a google search, print some things out and place them strategically on her desk.... Her tutorial drama class is doing a November production of The Secret Garden, and guess who was cast in the main role of Mary and has 200 lines to learn by mid-October? Just shoot me now, okay? I've shared a bit about Home Ec endeavors. Well, I actually have Annaleigh going through a curriculum put out by Christian Light, and last week she had to bake a dessert from scratch. We chose a recipe for a Swedish Apple cake...
Above, I'm showing her how to chop apples without chopping your fingers. That went well, as she still had ten appendages on her hands at its completion. Then here she is with the finished product...
It was VERY sweet, but I still gave her an A. That's about it for around here. Tune in soon for a reenactment of the Thirty Years War. I'm just kidding....my neighbors can't take much more. |
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