Story of the World, story of my life

Another great week for school in spite of the many things that threatened to derail our newly established routine which included an afternoon playdate with little people, a funeral, a sick Georgie, a gradual entry preschool schedule, and several nights without daddy to assist at bed time. Luckily we got all the regular things on our routine list done as well as plenty of school work.

This week we learned about nomads in our Story of the World. They go from place to place, rather like I have been doing for God knows how long. We also started our First Language Lessons and our Writing With Ease.

It has become clear to me that while Theo is very advanced in reading and writing, what he struggles with is narrating his thoughts. In other words he takes plenty in and has no trouble using good grammar, spelling, or punctuation, but he finds it very difficult to get his thoughts out of his head, either verbally or on paper. That means that for the most part the copy work prescribed by my language, writing, and history curricula are far too easy and largely unnecessary. He already knows he has to capitalize "I" and proper nouns. He knows how to use the Oxford comma. However if you ask him to explain in his own words a paragraph he just read he really struggles. That's what the narration work is about helping. I think the copywork helps him to remember what he's read or narrated at times but it's unnecessary for teaching proper grammar and usage.

In any case what we have been doing is two lessons from First Language Lessons per week. This is basic grammar learning. This week we reviewed nouns and pronouns and learned about verbs. I gave him definitions from the book for copywork. Once he is comfortable with cursive, he will do copywork in cursive instead of print. He is getting there fast.

Then from Writing With Ease we did narration exercises only in which we read together and I ask review questions about the passages. Writing With Ease is set up with four short lessons per week, two of copywork and two of narration, and then you are supposed to repeat those patterns with reading material from sources other than the book for two more weeks before moving on to the next section of the book. Instead of using this three-week cycle I plan to continue moving ahead with two narrations from the book per week and then using our Story of the World and possibly or science work as additional narration and copywork. It's possible that Theo is ready to skip the first year stuff in Writing With Ease entirely, but I would rather just work through it quickly. Especially as he has so much he can use in his history to practice narration with.

Story of the World is proving very enjoyable for him I am glad to say. We are using two different student work books for this curriculum. We have a very nice portfolio book which is published by an Orthodox woman who designed it for homeschoolers and uses more than just Story of the World for primary texts. We also have the student pages and teaching manual from Peace Hill Press. The only trouble is that our portfolio doesn't actually follow the same order as the book or the corresponding student pages. For example, the portfolio begins with the creation of the world in Genesis, and moves on to Sumer before going back to ancient Egypt, whereas The Story of the World teaches first what history is, moves on to people as nomads and early farmers, and then straight on to Egypt before going on to Sumer. I have decided to follow the book, not the portfolio, even if the portfolio outline makes a little more sense to me. Theo is loving it. We reviewed what history is, read about  nomadic people and first farmers, did his map work and some copywork for each chapter section which was just based on his own narrations. And he was very very keen to finish work in his portfolio on first civilizations which we started experimentally back in June.

And of course with going to the library three times a week we have so many books we can hardly manage them all. He got out a book on magnetic force this week and has been trying various experiments on his own with fridge magnets and paper clips. Because he is already an avid reader he is super keen to try out any and all activities he comes across in all these books. The only problem is he is still six and has no notion that 6pm on Friday night when the baby is grumpy is maybe not the best time to start asking mom for thread and tweezers and scotch tape for God knows what purpose. It would be hilarious if I wasn't so tired. In fact it's incredibly precious and I wish I had his energy and could drop everything to do random science experiments at any moment. I hate to curb the enthusiasm. Especially because at six he is not easy to curb and we usually end up in a shouting match because it's bloody well time for bed and no you can't have an egg and a glass of water. But still. It's great that he is so eager to learn.

He did a little math with me but I am still working out how to get into this new history and language work so he only did one lesson this week and a little cursive happened in there too.

This morning we had a chat about sugar. He told me that he didn't want peaches because they had sugar (since they're sweet) and sugar is bad, so we had a little lesson about the difference between natural and refined sugar and why one was good and healthy and the other bad and unhealthy. We have also had talks about allergies, which he had read about but he has been wondering about too because we have friends with nut allergies and Georgie was not allowed lärabars at preschool because they had treenuts.

I have been making an effort to get poetry for the kids as well and we got some Edward Lear which I remember loving as a kid. Must find the copy I had as a child because the one we got from the library had beautiful pictures but I feel nostalgic for the ones I loved as a kid.

Georgie has been a bit easier and I am trying to back off the alphabet learning and just offer more opportunities to her to play number and letter puzzles with me. She knows G of course and is so proud of that. And I really think one day she will turn around and tell me them all out of nowhere. She is much better at drawing than Theo was at her age and could probably be doing Story if the World and Writing With Ease along with Theo. She's great at narration is not quite ready for copywork. But I think she will pick it up pretty quick.

I am not all that happy with her preschool so far. We discovered that the library doesn't open until 9:30 meaning Theo and have to kill a half hour after we drop her off before we get any work done which is not ideal. Plus her teacher speaks English rather brokenly. Georgie is great with language and very articulate, but it's not ideal. Plus the teacher introduced herself by her first name. Even our strong start teacher had the sense to refer to herself as Mrs. Mac. And Georgie was noticeably older and more mature than the other kids. I don't want to push Georgie but if u am going to shell out for preschool I want it to be A)convenient for Theo and I to get his work done, and B) a good educational experience to prepare Georgie doing school with me. So I am looking into a Montessori preschool next week in the hopes that it will be something slightly better than what we have currently, which seems to be glorified babysitting. She still misses her strong start teacher and I so wish I could take her there and still get Theo's work done, but it's just too far on foot and of course Theo can't go too.

In any case we had a very successful second week of school. Next week we have a slightly less hectic schedule. A trip to grandma's after schoolwork on Tuesdays and an afternoon playdate with other homeschooling friends on Thursdays. But otherwise a nice slow ease into the schedule. Once we are into the habit of using all our new curricula we will start doing old and new together until we can fit more subjects in per day.