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 week twenty  here  and further in the 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.

Living With The Seasons:  These past two weeks have been very odd in terms of weather  (ice, snow, cancellations of everything and then not a lot of snow, then some snow that melted quickly, etc) and the unexpected things (like my husband getting rear-ended in a car accident that brought us down to one car and having to drive him to the airport, and our oldest daughter getting braces!)  that popped up and  just had to be done during our normal school mornings, so it seems as if we didn’t get as much schooling in as usual.  However, the good news is we are not too far behind where we should be and I think our ending date will be May 22nd.  I hope! (It is typical for schools in the southeastern United States to run on an August through May schedule; in the northeast it is more of September through June).

Kindergarten:  We have really been enjoying our “King Winter” circle extending into dwarves and gnomes – our kindergartener knows so much of this circle and can recite and do so many of the hand motions and such now!  Our story was “The Pancake that Ran Away” for the week of Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, and this week our story has been “The Rabbit and the Carrot”.  This is a tale from China found in my favorite little pink kindergarten book (“An Overview of the Waldorf Kindergarten”), and I have been telling this story with little wooden animals and our kindergartener loves, loves, loves this little tale!  Other than that, we have been doing a lot of our usual painting, coloring, cooking and playing.  I have worked very hard to set up a few times for our five year old to just play with some other five year olds, and have been grateful my husband has been home this week so we could divide and conquer so the bigger children could go to their activities and I could have some playtime for our five year old.  Lovely!

Fourth Grade:  We started the second block of Man and Animal.  Our first block we focused mainly on the threefold human being and this idea that some animals act like our heads, our trunks and then which animals are the limb animals or this something special and particular to us?  Our second block has started with more of  a look at this picture but through the lens of the human being have a metabolic-limb system, a rhythmic system and a nerve-sense pole.  So far we have looked at the American bison and cow as an example of the metabolic-limb system, the lion and the dog has an example of rhythmical animals, and the eagle as the example of the nerve-sense pole.  Next week we shall move into groupings of animals into discovery and look at examples of those animals from the habitats in our state to tie more into our local geography.  We are still reviewing math – especially adding and subtracting facts, times tables 2-8, money, time and measurement.  Grammar is another large area for us and we are working on present/past/future tense, along with working on nouns, verbs, pronouns, articles, adjectives, adverbs and examples of all of those.  We finished reading “Little Pear and His Friends” and also “Doctor Dolittle” and now we are reading “Thorkill of Iceland” by Isabel Wyatt, which I highly recommend after you finish your Norse Mythology block.   We haven’t had much going on in the way of handwork or music, but looking forward to that starting again.   Both our fourth grader and seventh grader are in the spring musical at church, so that will be a lot of rehearsals and singing….

Seventh Grade:  We are in our Physiology block.  I have quite a lot to say about this, so it probably will be a separate post.  So far we have done an introduction to the holistic spiritual human being, the digestive system, and the circulatory system.  This coming week will be the respiratory system and then we will move into human sexuality and the reproductive system.    We have also been working hard on math – especially reviewing and practicing ratios, metric measurement and geometry.   Her 4-H presentation is coming up, along with the spring musical at church.

I would love to hear what you are up to –

Blessings,
Carrie