1st week of school 2011 - review

Using our study materials for History/Geography/Social (Core) studies.

Our first week of school went really well! My main goals for the first week were to establish routine and to stay calm and patient. I think both were accomplished.

I have chosen to do the 4-day curriculum from Sonlight so that we have an extra day free for other kinds of learning. So we spent Monday - Thursday of last week getting into the routine of doing school every day as well as adjusting to our new curriculum. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly we got through the day's assigned work. We were consistently finishing our school work within 2 easy hours. If this trend continues then I may decide to add more than just 1 Science lesson per week. Or maybe add more memorization? I'm still not sure.

At the beginning of the week I thought that this all seemed too easy. Could we really be learning by just looking at good books, maps and timelines and putting the pieces together ourselves? But now that we are getting the hang of the Sonlight curriculum I am really enjoying how it is put together. The Core and Language Arts portions really fit well together. For Language Arts Jeremiah is reading sections of The Beginner's Bible and doing corresponding copy work, vocabulary, language rules, and creative writing. In Core he is learning about ancient peoples and the first civilizations. For instance, on the day that he learned about the first civilizations being formed in the Mesopotamia/Sumeria region (from a secular history book) he also read the story of Abraham being called out of Ur (one of the major cities in the ancient Sumerian culture) from his Bible. Soon we will be studying ancient Egypt while we read about Moses & Pharaoh. I like this combination of secular and Biblical learning. I like how it is showing Jeremiah that the Bible isn't just a book of fairy tales or moral stories, but that the stories and events in the Bible fit into history. As he studies history, he can have a new and deeper appreciation for the things he reads in the Bible. And by doing much of map and timeline work himself he really is learning a lot.

Nathaniel enjoys participating in school as well. I have some special activities for him (another separate blog post on that later) but he participates in the Core reading and work with us. He also listens to our Read-Alouds (currently reading Homer Price by Robert McCloskey).

I was worried that I was going to need much more preparation time than I did last year. But so far I have been pleasantly surprised. This curriculum is set up so that I can just pull out my Instructor's Guide and start on our day's lessons. I spent about an hour on Friday afternoon gathering the materials we would need for the following week.

I am pleased with how our first week went. I am pleased with our curriculum. I think we are going to have a fun and educational year.