It is hard to believe that I last posted in this series on April sixteenth.  You can find the post about weeks twenty-eight and twenty-nine here.

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 twenty four through twenty six 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:  Week Thirty saw our homeschool play on the Norse Myths come to fruition for our middle child.  Other than that, it has been a busy time of endings for the school year.  4-H has ended, along with church choir, the physics class for our oldest, and the church musical is over.  I love the feeling of things winding down and the beauty of Eastertide and May Day.

Homeschool Planning:  Friends, I am working very hard so I do  not have to spend my entire summer planning.  I am mostly through fifth grade, half of the six year old kindergarten year and have various blocks of eighth grade done.  I am hoping to be totally done at the end of June and can just take July to enjoy the summer.  We shall see if that comes to fruition!

Kindergarten:  Kindergarten at this time of year is about playing and developing gross motor skills!  We have been continuing a simple circle and story, fingerplays and seasonal singing.  We are moving this week from a sweet Suzanne Down story of Old Gnome and his friend the frog found in Suzanne’s wonderful book “Old Gnome Through The Year” into a story specifically for The Feast of Ascension on Thursday, May 14 (the story can be found in the back of the book “All  Year Round”).    Most of all we have been swimming, walking a lot and we hope to go strawberry picking in the next few weeks.

Fourth Grade:  It took us several weeks to finish up grasshoppers, bees, ants, and butterflies in our last Man and Animal block.   We did quite a bit of modeling, drawing and poetry with our insect friends, and I also brought in the chapters about bees and butterflies from Charles Kovacs’ “Botany” book.  This week, we have moved  into a review of all four math processes and the fractions introduced in the fall.  I have put together my own lessons for this block based off the few lessons in Dorothy Harrer’s “Math Lessons for Elementary Grades” (free ebook) and Marilyn Burns’ “Lessons for Introducing Fractions”, available used through Abe Books or other used booksellers.  We have been working very hard on math and spelling.  We finished  “Little Bee Sunbeam” and now we are reading “Heroes of the Kalevala:  Finland’s Saga” by Babette Deutsch.  I know everyone extolls “The Land of Heroes”, but I really like Deutsch’s version.   

Seventh Grade:  Hard to believe that seventh grade is coming to an end! 

So far we have done (picking up from the list I began in the previous post):

• A Summary of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael that I talked about in the previous post
• A line drawing in the style of Leonardo.
• A map of Spain in the time of Ferdinand, Isabella and Columbus
• A pastel chalk drawing of the boats of Columbus
• A colored pencil drawing of Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses to the church door
• A map of the British Isles at the time of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare
• A portrait of Queen Elizabeth (colored pencil) with quote
• A charcoal portrait of William Shakespeare

Forging into Latin American geography and the great Aztec, Maya and Incan civilizations and the Spanish coming to the New World, we have:

• A beautiful title page
• A physical map of Latin America with all mountains and highlands, lowlands and coastal plain areas labeled/ discussed as well as the Atacoma Desert
• A summary of the Andes Mountains and a painting; I want to go back and do a portrait of the people of the Andes if we have time
• A summary of The Pampas and the gaucho, quotes from “Martin Fierro”, the epic gaucho saga by Jose Hernandez which we read.
• A summary of the Amazon Basin; drawing of jaguars

In math we are actually reviewing measurement and conversions of all types and she is finishing up The Key To Algebra book 2.  This year we finished up through Book Five of The Key Geometry books, books 1 and now 2 of Algebra, and books 1 and 2 of Metric Measurement.  Still more to do!

We finished reading “The Second Mrs. Gianconda” and my daughter is reading, “I, Don Pareja” herself.  We are now reading aloud “The Secret of the Andes.”

We are entering into a discussion of Mayan civilization and I hope to have a large scale project. 

We are still here plugging away!

Blessings,
Carrie