I am trying to post a little wrap-up of each week of grades seven, four and five year old kindergarten year throughout the 36 weeks I have planned for school this year.  I hope this will encourage mothers that are homeschooling multiple children (or who want to but are worried!), and  encourage mothers that even homeschooling children of multiple ages who are far apart in age is doable.  You can find weeks six and seven  here and further in back posts you can find a post pertaining to the first two days of school this year which gives insight to our general daily rhythm.

Kindergarten:  This week was a birthday week for our kindergartener, so we had some company from family and friends to celebrate!  However, my little one also managed to get a good cold going by his birthday, so other than limited company and baking, this week has been a bit subdued.  We are continuing our foray into apples with the making of apple muffins and applesauce and we got out the fall books to enjoy.  Soon we will be going pumpkin picking, but we try to go closer to All Saints Day since the weather is often hot and the pumpkin will rot before that weekend if we get it too early!

Fourth Grade:  We are continuing our handwriting, math and spelling practice.  Due to some visual challenges, handwriting in particular can be labor intensive and frustrating at times for her, printing more so than cursive.  Our Man and Animal block is coming along .  It took us most of the week to finish up the head animals.  We wet on wet watercolor painted a squid, made a shoebox diaroma of an underwater scene of a  giant clam replete with sandpaper sting rays and sand dollars, and hunted  and drew  snails.  We had a bit of writing to do  and now are moving into the trunk animals by beginning with the seal and the American bison.   Choir and cross stitching are still going on along with church group for 4th and 5th graders and 4H and horseback riding.

Seventh Grade:  We finished up astronomy with looking at the planets, and then moved into the Great Astronomers, heading back into Pythagoras and Ptolemy, and moving into Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, the telescope and a last look at the Earth as the perfect place for human beings to live, work and play.  The last bit of work we did included a portrait of Copernicus in charcoal pencil, a drawing of the Copernican system and Ptolemic system, a summary regarding Brahe and Kepler and Kepler’s planetary laws.  We already discussed Galileo and read the book “Starry Messenger” as part of our creative writing, and we will circle back to Galileo during the optics part of our physics block, so I chose to not include a summary about Galileo yet.  We painted gaseous and terrestrial planets,  our plan for an afternoon next week is to make a solar system to hang out (paper mache) and our last look at astronomy is an independent report to be finished over the next week.  I offered a variety of topics including the sun (sunspots, solar flares, etc), stars, black holes, rocket propulsion,  comets and meterorites, what the Hubble Telescope saw.  My daughter chose to do a report on black holes, so we will be researching that at our local library.  We will be  moving into Colonial America today, so more about that in next week’s wrap-up.  Our daughter is still reading “Call to Courage” and has looked up vocabulary and we have done some oral discussion about this book.  Choir is still a mainstay of our week, along with youth group and 4H and horses.

Most homeschool mothers I am talking with right now say they are about a week or so behind. I know we are.   So, I think that is common at this point of the year.  You can always go back and revise your plans!

Many blessings,
Carrie