Monday, September 8, 2014

Work Plans for the Week of September 8, 2014: Pioneer Indiana and Ancient China



 

MONDAY: Right now, the kids are coloring pictures of Asian dragons (the younger kid's is Chinese; the older kid's is Japanese) while we listen to our The Story of the World chapter on Emperor Qin Shi Huang and his Great Wall and terra cotta army. I'm very excited because on Thursday, we're going to see some real artifacts from this army!

The older kid's math also went excellently well; she was able to use arrays to help her work multi-digit multiplication problems and long division problems. Her Math Mammoth this week is a review of simple division and long division. I think the younger kid will enjoy her math, as well; she'll be graphing her toy animals in preparation for her Math Mammoth units on graphing this week.

First Language Lessons is still tooling along, with sentence diagramming and memorization of the current poem.

My decision to stop making states and capitals memorization fun is working fine so far. The kids each have a US map, and they color in each state as they learn it. This makes it easy to know what they're supposed to have already learned; review is simple, and assigning additional states is also simple. Not fun, necessarily, but simple!

TUESDAY: After much hemming and hawing on my part, Matt convinced me to do the day trip to Conner Prairie on this day. The kids are studying pioneer history, after all, it's not a super long drive, and the admission price certainly can't be beat! As a bonus, there are apparently several enrichment activities that kids can do in the pioneer town, using activity guides similar to the Junior Ranger books that they love so much. This enrichment, which will involve interacting with the characters in various scenarios and doing plenty of critical thinking about pioneer life, will absolutely make the whole day worthwhile, and that's only one section of the place!

WEDNESDAY: I expect Tuesday's trip to be tiring, but I do still want a full school day on this day, so I tried to combine quicker and easier subjects, such as spelling and (hopefully) this day's Math Mammoth, with the fun subject of Girl Scouts. Based on what we did at Conner Prairie, I'll write a list of essay prompts, then ask each kid to choose one to write, edit with my help, and revise.

Aerial silks classes begin again this week; the kids will be happy to get back on the silks!

THURSDAY: We'll be spending this entire day at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. The kids can play in the museum all morning (perhaps visiting the fossil prep lab...), and we plan to visit a couple of the employees from our dig trip, and in the afternoon we have an all-ages homeschool class on the terra cotta army, and then we'll visit the actual terra cotta warriors exhibit. I'm SUPER excited!

FRIDAY: I've written lesson plans for this day, but my guess is that after two full-day field trips and the completion of our four-day school week, I may declare this day a holiday. Even if I decide to muscle through, I did pack this day's schedule with only the quick and easy subjects. The exception is art; Matt plans to give the kids a lesson on logo and commercial design, then have them complete a second draft of their "I Voted" sticker design for a local competition.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: The younger kid has ballet but this is our only organized activity this weekend --yay! We try to do something fun as a family each day, but I'd like to host a housewarming party soon, and so Matt and I are buckling down to get our home in order.

Because even though I adore this house so much and feel as if I've lived here forever, I do admit that it would be even nicer without all my art supplies and the kids' toys on the floor.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

2 comments:

Tina said...

Moving is a pain in the butt, but kinda fun at the same time. It feels so good once everything has a home.

I think things might be settled down enough for us to get some schooling done this week. We will probably start tomorrow with some SOTW and Math Mammoth. Kinda ease into things.

Have the girls read "The Unicorn Chronicles" by Bruce Coville? I just finished book four (so far there are only four books) and Emma is finishing up book three.

julie said...

The kids are at aerial silks right now, so I just went ahead and put all the Unicorn Chronicles on hold for them. I'm sure Syd hasn't listened to them, so I got audiobooks for her, and Will's always happy to read/re-read anything about unicorns!