We started school again.  This is the first 2 days of our second quarter.  I gave dd7 a math test from the work done last quarter…she aced it!!  Very simple stuff though.  We had to slow down the pace from what the workbook was doing so we are still at the beginning of the workbook…lots of ground to cover but I see improvement in her understanding and retention…I’ve just got to try not to put too much pressure on her when she gives wrong answers for what I know she knows…trying to get her to THINK about what the problem is asking and not just memorize and spit out the answer. 

My ds5 is doing well with his spelling/phonics/orthography…I finally decided to start using WRR(Writing Road to Reading) with him and we went over yesterday sounding out and spelling the words from the Ayers list…we worked on these:  go, me, and, do, at.

As I taught each word we wrote each letter and he did wonderful…yes, he’s a boy and he argued with me over which way the lower case ’a’ faces and things like that but I held up and out and we finally got the lesson accomplished…at least we got accomplished what I could handle!!!

Today for read aloud we read the book Bearskin by Howard Pyle.  It was a good little story.  

So we are back in the saddle again, after being somewhat refreshed by our 2 week vacation…it was very nice…thank the Lord!!!! 

What a fun-time we had in our read aloud time yesterday! I don’t read aloud everyday…I wish I could be consistent enough to do that but we do it when I really feel the inspiration. I blogged the other week about taking a read-aloud/literature book and take as many lessons as we can from that. Well, my children asked me the other day if they could watch the Sword in the Stone movie. I said yes, since we are still on ‘vacation’…and it gave me a thought to go get books on knights, and armor and such. So I consulted the reading list from Teaching the Trivium’s products. The Bluedorns son and daughter has published a list of good read alouds and biographies and such. So I chose to get books by Homer Pyle(fitting with my dc’s desire to watch the Sword in the Stone and medieval times). I got the one entitled Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. I was seeking an unabridged version and I think I got one…most of them say “adapted by such and such”.

As I began to read I could tell it was not ‘capturing’ my children’s attention. They were in the room listening but out of obedience, if u know what I mean. Their minds were elsewhere. As I read the scene describing how Robin Hood met Little John and how they had a ‘duel’ fighting with ‘cudgers’ and ‘goose-feathered arrows’ I started to really act out the scenes as I read them and the more I got into they did. I even began to have them act out scenes. I told boy(5) that he would be Robin Hood and girl(7) that she could be Little John and when I got to the part where Robin Hood told his merry men “Three blasts upon the bugle horn I will blow in my hour of need, then come quickly, for I shall want your aid”—-I had boy(5) blow his pretend horn and then had “Little John” run to his aid. We had a blast!!!

The second chapter was the story of how the Sherriff of Nottingham tried to trap Robin in by having a shooting match. As the archers from surrounding towns came to compete — “And now the archers shot, each man in turn, and the good folk never saw such archery as was done that day”–my children went and grabbed their “bow and arrows” they had made out of plastic clothes hangers and my dd’s hair elastic hair bands and used non-sharpened pencils for arrows — they each took their turn at shooting—each other and me.

I loved it and they did too. I stopped after the 1st chapter so that we could clean up the downstairs and my dd says to me “Mommy what about the story of Robin Hood”? I promised her I would read more after we cleaned up and I tended to the baby. Then we read the 2nd chapter.

I decided to try and make a “little” vocabulary lesson to enhance their understanding of what they hear me read. I made up a sheet of vocabulary words b/c this book is written in very similar style as the King James Bible…using words like nay, no harm shall befall him(Robin Hood speaking of LIttle John), guile, etc. so I made a list of 10 vocab. words from the first 2 chapters that me and dd(7) will look up in the dictionary and define.

Here are the words I chose:

• archer
• forest
• skill
• cunning
• yeomen
• outlaw
• bold
• shrewd p. 12
• cudgels p. 13
• 10.Nay p. 14

Part 2 of this assigment is to copy the sentences that these words are used in from the book–exactly as the author wrote it. I think I’ll use these sentences as copywork for our cursive handwriting, vocabulary, grammar/sentence construction, paragraph writing. Here are the passages we will attempt to work on:

Copy each sentence. Underline all vocabulary words.

• No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his.
• There lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood.
• Nor were there ever such yeomen as the seven-score merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades.
• When Robin was a youth of eighteen, stout of sinew and bold of heart, the Sheriff of Nottingham proclaimed a shooting-match and offered a prize of forty marks to whomsoever should shoot the best shaft in Nottingham.
• So shrewd was the stroke that the stranger came within a hair’s breadth of falling off the bridge.
• I must needs own thou art a brave and a sturdy soul, and, withal, a good stout stroke with the cudgels.”
• Nay, forbear!” cried Robin; “he is a right good man and true, and no harm shall befall him.”

I received in my email a wonderul example of how to teach grammar, spelling, vocab, and penmanship straight from descriptive texts of living books. You can view this article on how to do that here at Trivium Pursuit email list archives.

I would just be sure to add/teach the biblical origin/purpose and the biblical prinicples of each of these subject areas.

powered by performancing firefox

In our last, ‘haphazard’, 3 weeks we had to take a more ‘relaxed’ approach to our homeschooling due to the many events/celebrations that occurred. I purchased some time ago A FAMILY PROGRAM FOR READING ALOUD developed by ROSALIE JUNE SLATER. This has been a wonderful, very rich resource of classic reading selections and how to teach certain categories of literature from the Principle Approach. I decided to go back to the beginning of the book and start there with my read aloud selections. We don’t read aloud as often as I want to..our days seem to get away from us. I guess I feel like Literature is not priority on our list of subjects to study but in the last several weeks we have managed to investigate several of the suggested books in this wonderful resource written by Ms. Slater.

POETRY: We started with THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE FOR YOUNG FOLKS for our poetry introduction. We started with this in July. We are also using Abeka’s spelling workbook and they have a poem assigned for each month for the student to memorize, to use expression when reciting, to practice reading with alternately with Mommy. DD’s favorite poem in THE HOME BOOK OF VERSE is TREE’s by Joyce Kilmer. It goes like this:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A treee that looks a God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

We’ve also recited Robert Blake’s THE LAMB which is the poem in Abeka’s spelling and poetry text.
Little lamb Little Lamb Who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
………..etc.

We worked on this one also in Abeka’s spelling and poetry text…A THANK YOU PRAYER..author unknown
For milk to drink and food to eat;
For eyes and ears and hands and feet;
Thank You God

For mother, father, and their care
For our house and clothes to wear
Thank You God

For friends with whom I run and play
For sun and rain and night and day
Thank You God

For all the things You give to me
Help me to always thankful be
Thank You God.

We will study Psalm 23 as poetry as well as the other literary genre found in the Bible.

PICTURE BOOKS AND STORIES: We got from the library and read the following:

THE RUNAWAY BUNNY
THE GINGERBREAD BOY
**TIME OF WONDER
**THE BIG SNOW
THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD
THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
MADELINE-this is turning out to be one of my dc’s favorite. We found a ‘pop-up, 3D’ version of this book’

** we did not read these as they were due back to the library before we any interest was aroused in these books. They were kind of slow moving I think for my dc. TIME OF WONDER was very descriptive(which is good) but at the time I started to read it my dc had blank faces and were not really interested…so back to the library it went..maybe we’ll try again with it later.

We also have ‘zoo-billion’ other picture books, easy readers, and easy chapter books on the children’s shelves and also in our schoolroom that have been given to us(free! Praise God!!) by other parents and such…some were going to be THROWN out by the school my dh works for…some of these were BRAND NEW, STILL IN THE PLASTIC books that my dh found in the ‘throw away’ pile at his school so God has blessed us to have a home library already. I just need to make MORE use of these books, i.e. take the time to look thru them myself b/c the dc choose the same ones over and over and when dd is feeling lazy she’ll choose one with as few words a possible

So that is the beginning ’smathering’ of our read-aloud program. Sometimes I wish we could do all of study from one literature book..I guess you would call that a literature unit. I wonder if somehow I could teach reading, spelling, grammar, history, geog, science, etc. from one classic novel. This is kind of burning in my heart to do this so I think I will look into how to write lessons for these subject areas after choosing a children’s classic…just something very basic but still cover the important areas.

powered by performancing firefox