Week 1

We finished our first week of school and it went really well.

All three boys studied/reviewed Creation, although Gabriel's kindergarten curriuculum took him through Day 5 of Creation this week and the older boys got through all seven days. It was nice to start out with something they are all quite familiar with to ease back into schooling.



This is Matthew's summary of the seven days of Creation.  For the day of rest, he drew a bed.


Here is Christopher's summary page.  He drew the bed for the day of rest as well.  Silly boys.  I've been reminding Gabe and Matthew about the difference in the letters 'b' and 'd' using the bed rule which is why Christopher wrote his bed using the word "bed".


For art, we are using God and the History of Art.  For the first lesson, we learned about an artist who had become paralyzed after a swimming accident.  She taught herself to draw and paint with her mouth.  The lesson was about the frustration often felt when making art, even by the most famous of artists.  Incidentally, Gabriel refused to do the lesson because it was too hard.


Matthew had a really loose bottom tooth while he did this, so it was even more of a challenge.


The objective was to draw a butterfly.  Christopher's paper is on top, Matthew's on the bottom of the picture.  I didn't try it or I'm sure mine wouldn't have been good either!

So, one of the things in each of the boys' back-to-school gift pile was this yellow shirt with some iron-on paper.  They each drew a picture, we scanned it to the computer and printed it back out on the iron-on paper.  They turned out really cute.  Unfortunately, the prints only lasted a couple of hours before they started coming off.  Chris said it works better if you cut around the area that is colored rather than leaving a lot of blank white space.

Christopher drew Gabriel's idea for this shirt.  Gabe kept getting frustrated that he couldn't draw it as good as he wanted.  See, he should have done the art lesson with us!


Christopher drew some of the handguys that I talked about a few posts back.  This is the correct spelling of 'Bagypants'.  For whatever reason, he wants it spelled this way.


Ever since we went to the Six Flags theme park last week, the kids have been obsessed with drawing pictures of roller coasters.  Matthew drew one of the ones that he made up.  I won't be going on this one should it ever become a real roller coaster.  I went on the Boomerang ride at Six Flags with Matthew and going upside down a few times was too much for me.


Doing school during Leah and Anna's afternoon nap is working out well.  We are still going straight through everything without breaks and it's working for the boys.  Gabriel's school work is pretty light right now and will be again during the second week.  Matthew is doing quite a bit of writing and I think I'll break some of it up into multiple days for a while.  He is doing great with math and does as many lessons as he wants right now, which is usually two or three.  I started him out at Singapore Math level 1A so that he wouldn't get right to the hard stuff while adjusting to the longer school day, so he's still doing simple math right now.

Christopher is still learning decimals as he continues in his Singapore Math level 4B book from last year and is doing well with it.  It's so nice that I don't have to teach him with that, he just figures it out as he goes.  If he can just continue this through middle and high school math, that would be wonderful.  Math was my favorite subject in school, and while it's easy for me to learn, I'll have to re-learn it with him I think.  That's okay, my brain could probably use the challenge.

We are using Genesis for Kids for science and studied "light" this week.  We took a trip to the library and borrowed a bunch of science experiment books about light, as well as one about optical illusions, which was fun to look through with the boys one night.  Christopher is old enough now where he'll just go do science experiments on his own or with his brothers and usually needs no help.  It's really nice, because while I enjoy doing some experiments with the kids, they like to do way more than I do.  Plus, it's good for him to learn more on his own as well.