School Week 25 2011

This week A9 and I are starting the next books in the My America series... Hope's Revolutionary War Diaries, Books 1-3. A9 loved the 1st 3 books and I'm sure it will be the same with these three!
Besides the My America books we will be reading about George Washington, Paul Revere and Ben Franklin again!

After we read all three books we are going to watch the movie The Patriot, yes the one with Mel Gibson... I love the way the movie depicts how a bunch of farmers defeated the greatest army of the time...

We also started a new writing curriculum.... after starting Writing Strands and doing it for two weeks I was not happy with it, neither was A9... I didn't want creative writing, which is what this seemed to be.. so I switched to Writing with Ease: Vol2, I also purchased Vols 3 & 4. This curriculum is more of what I had in mind. Lots of narration and dictation as a way of building up her writing skills... We did our first narration exercise today and the workbook really helps the parent ask the right questions. Tomorrow will be our first dictation exercise... I will be dictating back the same sentences she herself came up with to summarize the story we read.

X6 is rowing the book The Greatest Treasure, we are learning about China! I have been working very hard on a language lessons workbook for X6 for next year. After using LLVY 1&2 with A9, I knew that I wanted something very similar to do with X6, the things is LLVY has TOO much copywork. Sometimes over five days of copywork in a row, torwards the end it has 20 copywork lessons in a row..A9 was so tired of it after awhile. So, when we did LLVY2 she did NO copywork at all.. that was over half the book. She had it all done by December.

She is now doing Primary Language Lessons, which she absolutely loves!! I will be doing the same with X6 when he is in 3rd grade. For next year I decided that I wanted the grammar and picture study of LLVY and the narration and copywork of Writing with Ease Vol 1. The copywork is only two times a week, no more!

So I did it!! I made my own language lessons workbook using the elements I like from the two other books. I will be using it with X6 for the next two years and then we'll start PLL and Writing with Ease Level 2!