Smooth Schooling

We are well back into the groove of homeschooling after taking a several-weeks break when Anna arrived.  The boys seem to have a better attitude in general when they have some sort of routine.  Granted, schooling takes only an hour or two each afternoon during Leah's afternoon nap, but it's enough routine to remind the boys that they are not wild animals who can do whatever they want.  Chores help with that too, and that has slipped a bit since a while back.  Lately all the boys do is feed the dog and do the dinner dishes most days.  Once I step on the 1000th Lego of the day, I usually make them clean up the endless supply of Legos all over the house as well. 

Anyways, I kind of stalled on teaching the science part of our curriculum this year even though the kids absolutely love science.  I was growing a baby then, and too tired from that hard baby-growing work.  Now that Anna takes some naps at the same time as Leah, we are in high gear with science.  As in an experiment every day instead of every week.  We use the Usbourne science books for Matthew's first grade science and we are using "Things Outdoors" right now.  We've been examining seeds and growing sunflowers (which actually haven't started growing yet), figuring out how evaporation works, learning about weather and trees, and exploding volcanoes this week.  The boys all get excited when it's time for science.

Christopher finally finished up the section about fractions this week and moved on to graphs.  He's very happy about that and has worked ahead in math this week to give himself a few free days. 

We finished up learning about India this week.  I think we learned the most from our read-aloud book about Amy Carmichael, a missionary.  We have to have our Indian dinner still, but Chris is gone tonight and tomorrow for a men's retreat with our church, or a daddies camp-out as I explained it to the kids.  So we'll make some Indian food for dinner Sunday. 

Christopher loved reading about the missionary Amy Carmichael, which we actually finished last week because he wanted me to read ahead so often.  The younger boys usually sit in when I read the missionary books aloud too.  We started David Livingstone, which we were supposed to read when we learned about Africa and didn't get to for some reason, probably a reason involving a baby getting ready to be born when we studied Africa.

We'll be traveling to China next week and I think we might celebrate with Chinese food more than just that end-of-the-study food day.