I just about keep forgetting to come on here and journal.  Well, actually the real excuse is that I don't have much time.  But I really would like to keep this up.  I've been cutting and pasting my past entries into a Word document and saving them under My Documents in the Journal folder in my Homeschool folder.  I think at the end of the semester I'll print it out and place it in our school folder.  I'll do the same for the second semester.  This is my journaling of Joshua's school and I really enjoy doing this.  Gotta keep it up!   So here are two pictures that show some of the activities we covered last week.

     Here Joshua is working on our science material.  You know at first I was quizzing and drilling him on all the different lists that we had learned: the 2 types of living things (Plants and Animals), the 2 catagories of Animals (Vertebrates and Invertebrates), the 5 types of Vertebrates (Mammals, Reptiles, Amphibians, Birds, Fish), and  the 5 characteristics of Mammals (Feed babies milk, Birth live babies, Warm-blooded, Have hair, Breathe air).  Joshua enjoys this science study, but I was burning him out with expecting him to have this stuff memorized!  I remembered that he is young and this material is for exposure--remember the little hooks!  So I quit expecting memorization of animal catagories and now we just list them together orally every time we cover science. 
    And then I came up with this cool activity where he placed multi-colored labels for each division and catagory on a small chart.  He enjoyed this.  I might devise a more permanent chart, laminate it and then make the labels for him to go over.  Kind of like a game.  I think this would be a good thing to do at the end of our study of the animal kingdom.  I'll make a chart covering the animal kingdom and he can use it to review the things we have covered.  It won't be something he'll have to do from memory, though.  Good idea!

    He's still working on the memorization of Romans 1:20.  THAT is something I DO want him to memorize, and he has been doing a great job.
    And then here is his cow.  I think my goal with this material is to take it to a point when Joshua can do this on his own.  With this cow, I continued to "walk" him through the drawing of the cow.  I directed him to pay attention to how large he was drawing the body in comparison to the head, or to take note of how long the legs should be in proportion to the body.  But in this drawing I left him alone in drawing the background.  You can see that his hills are haphazard in the background, but I think he did an excellent job with his stream and rocks.  And the coloring was done independently as well.  (He's still pretty fascinated with the idea of shadowing ever since I "taught" him how to make shadows under the subject!)  Good Job, Joshua!