THINGS I AM DOING RIGHT:
*starting by 10:15 at the latest (usually 10)
*reinforcing the morning chores and compensating them (I check off my chart and keep track of the $ earned)
*We are consistently doing our morning work together: read our Bible lesson, read from Mystery of History or Encyclopedia of the Ancient World and/or Archaeology for Kids.
*I am LOVING the interactive notebooks. They take notes during our morning reading on the right side of their notebooks. They jot down what they think is important, and then I make sure they have the key points down and go over spelling of the names if needed. The next day, we use the left-side of the notebook as our review. I usually do a quick Internet search of our topic each night and either print out photos, maps, charts, or mini-books for them to paste on the left-side. Or, they draw a picture themselves. Here are some photos of their notebooks:
This last one is my favorite! A Stonehenge mini-book that is shaped to mimic the shape of the stones! It opens up, and we posted a bunch of photos of Stonehenge. This site ( http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications) also had an interactive tour of Stonehenge; they took a panoramic photo from the very center so you could look all around. Love!! There is also a photo of Hammurabi's Stele next to the Stonehenge booklet on this page . (At the top is his drawing to help him remember the definition of "epic."
Here is the site I used for the other mini-books:
I use Wikipedia a lot and just "copy image," go to a blank text document and paste it twice (one for each boy). I do this with maps, too.
Then, after morning work and notebooking, we either go to the sun room or living room and read our novel together. We finished The Golden Compass today; we all enjoyed it.
THINGS I NEED TO WORK ON:
Life keeps getting in the way of the daily after-school conference. I do realize that I probably don't need to do this daily. The past two weeks we've only done one per week. I would like maybe 2x or 3x per week. Also, my high-schooler is overwhelmed with all the different resources from Winter Promise and is not finishing everything. I need to be more diligent about making sure the work is done. Also, aside from tests, I still don't know a great way to evaluate him. Sigh.
I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO:
the fact that we are taking next week off! We will still have to complete our homework for co-op, but hopefully we can catch up on anything missing from our own year thus far.
ON MY TO DO LIST:
We need to fill in our Table-of-Contents on the first page of our interactive notebooks. Also, I had meant to organize the many free printables I've gathered before the school year started. It is still not done. Also, I am tired of not having pens, pencils, scissors and glue sticks when I need them. I want to make a kit for each of us that we keep everything in and always have with us.
OTHER:
I finished this book for book club and HIGHLY recommend it:
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh.
In co-op, I am teaching 3-5th graders NC History. My high-schooler is taking World View and a writing class. My 5th grader is taking an early American History class and Couch to 5K. My youngest is thrilled with co-op; my oldest is complaining. He does have a lot of homework in the writing class. He also takes a 1.5 hour Biology Lab each week. We have two weeks of this down!
Thanks for reading!
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