Week in Review - The Ice Age, Some Socialization, and Aboriginal Themed Art (Week 3)

I truly can't believe that we just finished our THIRD week of school!  The weeks have truly been flying by with good busy-ness.  Overall, all aspects of this school year are getting off to a smooth and productive start. 

I am planning to tweak our schedule quite a bit next week to address a number of different issues but I am not discouraged by the changes that need to be made.  When I set up a schedule, I expected that I would need to tweak it after we lived the schedule for a while.  I am planning to flip our day and do history first thing in the morning with everybody.  We'll see how the new schedule works for us next week.

The children accomplished quite a bit in their studies this week - much more than can be adequately covered in one post, so, as usual, I will focus on the highlights.

One of my favorite aspects of being a homeschooling mother is when I see my children take something they learned during our school time, and continue to learn more about the topic on their own.  Last week, our art lesson focused on Australian Aboriginal art, more specifically, an x-ray picture.  My very artsy son, Mason, asked to see other examples of Aboriginal art so I brought up scads of images for him on the internet.  Inspired, he created two Aboriginal-themed art projects on his own.  I particularly LOVE this one and am thinking of purchasing an inexpensive frame for it. 

I adore this fish picture as well, which is similar to the picture he did for the original art lesson, but with tons of color!

I have been incredibly impressed with the progress of both of my boys in the Ancient History Writing Course we are doing together from IEW.  I LOVE this course and it fits perfectly with our history studies this year.  For the past three weeks, we have been working on:

• quality adjectives
• strong verbs
• -ly adverbs
• poetry writing
• key word outlines
• writing a paragraph from a key word outline.

Most inspiring to my mother's heart is my youngest child eagerly wanting to read his finished writing projects to his dad over lunch (the meal of the day that we often eat together).  Duncan is SO proud of his writing.  Mason has been writing in his spare time on his own.  He has been writing scary short stories and has been enjoying just writing for the pleasure of it.

Having said all of that, the writing course is time-consuming.  We work together for about 30-45 minutes a day during the first part of the week.  Then, they work more independently on Thursday and Friday to finish their writing project for the week.  I am very hopeful, though, that this course will be a significant benefit to their writing skills.

Since Amber's schedule is quite academic this year with Biology, Algebra I, and Literary Analysis, I'm so glad I decided to add in a sewing course.  It makes a great break to her day - I'm going to try to fit the class in more than twice a week in my revised schedule.  She is almost finished with her first project, a ski hat.  I purchased enough material to make two, so one of her friends will be getting one as well.  Mason wants her to make one for him, too!

We finished our extra week on the Ice Age this week and will be getting back to the course plans for Quest for the Ancient World next week.  We watched another episode of Prehistoric Predators from National Geographic about an Ice Age bear.  We also finished our Ice Age lapbooks.  And I mean, completely finished, as the children all put the finished mini-books in the base themselves. I plan to review the material in the lapbook next week with a Jeopardy style game.

Lastly, we did the first part in a two-part art lesson this week.  The children are working on paintings that depict a crowd and a sporting event.  This week, they focused on painting the crowd and adding details to the faces.  Next week, they will add a sporting event for the crowd to watch.  Duncan is going to paint a bowling game, Amber is going to paint a swim meet, and Mason is undecided.

Mason, ever the creative one, wanted to add his own creative creatures to the first row, so all the people in his crowd are not actually people.  Amber always points out to him that if he went to a traditional school, he would have to follow the instructions for the art lesson closely.  Those comments always inspire me to say, "Go ahead, Mason, add your own twist to the art project."  I mean, really, isn't that one of the reasons that I decided to homeschool?

Lastly, we even got out and had some socialization this week.  We met dear friends for bowling late Tuesday afternoon.  We had a great time even if we were a bit rushed at the end to get Amber to swim team.

 

That was our Week in Review!  Amber and I will be heading out to a pond tomorrow morning to collect water samples for Biology.  The homeschooling fun never ends!  To see what other homeschoolers have been doing this week, check out the Weekly Wrap Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.