Weeks 4 and 5 Update

Ok, so I decided that I didn't like delaying my post by a week. It bugged me. :) We have now finished weeks 4 and 5!! Can we really have made it this far already?

HISTORY
We spent Week 4 studying various rulers of the early Medieval World - Charles Martel, Charlesmagne, Otto I. We listened to Story of the World and Mystery of History CDs (Did you know that Mystery of History is on CD also??).

Anything on CD is much easier for me than reading aloud. Not that I don't like reading aloud, but if we are listening to the CD, then I can be attending to the younger kids at the same time. We often get interrupted (and I get frustrated) when I'm trying to read aloud and there are lots of "little" distractions. :)

We spent Week 5 learning about Knights and listening to the story of King Arthur. We also read a short picture book on Beowulf.

The kids made their own Coats of Arms.

SCIENCE

Our butterflies came out of their cocoons this week. I am so happy that they survived! Nick had moved the butterfly house and the cocoons fell from the top of the house. I was worried that they weren't going to come out, but they did!!

Kate and Lexie then moved on to study the circulatory system. Here is a model of blood we made, using oil, red hots, and beans to stand for plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Ellie and Kate have finished the first 25 lessons of Sequential Spelling (4 and 1 respectively). I am really enjoying this program. I like that they don't have a set of words that they study for the week. The kids didn't like the "busy work" of the MCP Workout workbooks. I can really tell that Kate's spelling has improved over the past few weeks with this program.

Ellie's gift is definitely in reading and writing. She is very descriptive in her writing assignments - the words she uses amazes me sometimes. Writeshop has been a great fit for us, because it has very clear guidelines for the assignments, and it has a grading checklist for me (which I absolutely need!!)

Kate struggles with writing a bit more. She is only 7 though - I'm sure that she will improve with time and practice. She also doesn't enjoy reading like Ellie does. Reading is work to Kate, not something she does for pleasure. Instead of assigning her specific reading assignments, I have decided that I need to just make sure that she has 30 minutes of reading to herself (and she needs to be in a quiet place where she won't be distracted).

RUSSIAN
Ellie has finished the first unit of Rosetta Stone Russian. I like this program, but I think that I need to sit down with her and teach her the alphabet, so that she can get the full benefit of the program and be able to read the Cyrillic letters on the screen. I think that I will pull out my old books from when I was studying Russian in the Air Force and go through the sounds of the letters with her. (Russian has 32 letters!!)

ART
The kids are loving Artistic Pursuits and they are enjoying the variations in their lessons. I feel much better about art this year!! This is coming from someone that draws stick people. This makes the lessons so easy!!

MATH
I am loving Teaching Textbooks so far. It has made my day much easier. The lectures are given on the computer. Their answers are automatically graded for me. What more could I ask for??

Kate is zipping through grade 4 math without any problems whatsoever. I don't think she's gotten lower than a 91 - and she's enjoying it.

I wish that I could say the same for Ellie. Math just isn't her thing. I think part of it is a mental block - deciding that she just doesn't like math and then she tells herself she isn't good at it. I can't blame her, because I never cared for math much either.

I have to keep telling her that she is doing fine and not to compare herself to her sister. Ellie is doing grade 6 math and with the speed her sister is going through hers, her fear is that Kate will catch up to her - or worse yet pass her up.

I have to remind Ellie that math is just Kate's thing - and that Ellie excels in reading and writing (which Kate struggles with more).

It is interesting to see how the kids can be so different in their interests and talents.

I should mention that Lexie is working her way through Horizons 1. She isn't having any problems at all - she just needs to work on her handwriting skills. She is making her 5s and 3s backwards quite often. I'm sure that's pretty normal though.

Rosetta Stone Latin Contest!! :)

From JenIg's blog:

Rosetta Stone is the fastest way to learn a language and has been the #1 foreign language curriculum among homeschoolers for a while — and you can WIN the *all new* version 3 Rosetta Stone Homeschool LATIN program… FOR FREE! This is the first year you can get Latin in the brand new Version III update.

This is a $259 program (and believe me it’s worth every penny!)
This is a computer based curriculum and Rosetta Stone will also include a headset with microphone, and a supplementary “Audio Companion” CD so you can practice lessons in the car, on the go, or where-ever! Students participate in life-like conversations and actually produce language to advance through the program. Rosetta Stone incorporates listening, reading, grammar, vocabulary and writing along with speaking and pronunciation lessons. For parents, the new Parent Administrative Tools are integrated into the program to allow parents to easily enroll up to ten students in any of 12 predetermined lesson plans, monitor student progress, grade completed work (the program grades the work automatically as the students progress- I love that!), and you can view and print reports for transcripts. Homeschooling a lot of kids at your house? This program is designed to enroll and track up to ten students (five users on two computers) and will work for nearly all ages — from beginning readers up to college students.

To win this most excellent Latin program copy these paragraphs and post them in (or as) your next blog post, and/OR link to the contest from your facebook page and/OR email the information to your homeschool support group – Then go to the original page http://Jeneralities.com and leave a comment saying that you’ve posted about, or have linked to, the contest. Please make sure the link works to get back to the original contest page when you post. And good luck!

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We are planning on doing Rosetta Stone Russian this year, but Latin would be pretty cool too. Ellie did Latin for Children Book A this year and didn't enjoy it much. Anything that she can do on the computer always seems like more "fun" than work to her. :)

Parlez Vous Frustrated?

Paris, France, View of the Eiffel Tower
I think that foreign languages are such an important part of a child's education.

Maybe I am biased because I always enjoyed them growing up. I took 4 yrs of German and 2 yrs of French in high school and I went to Germany on a summer exchange program when I was 15. When I joined the Air Force, I became a Russian linguist. My husband was also a German, Russian, and Serbo-Croation linguist. I haven't used any of my language skills in the past 10 years and they are dwindling. This doesn't change the fact that I still love languages though.

So, when starting to homeschool my children, I decided that they definitely had to learn a language or two.

I didn't give Ellie a choice and told her that she would be starting Latin this year. She wasn't happy about this decision. We had tried Prima Latina with her a couple of years back and she did not like it. We both had a hard time with the woman's thick southern drawl. It might not bug other people, but I just couldn't get past hearing Latin with such a thick accent.

Fortunately, she LOVES the program that we chose: Latin for Children. The lessons are on DVD (thankfully!), the chants are catchy, and it comes with a workbook, activity book, and a primer to read. We're only on lesson 2, but she is actually really enjoying it. Hooray!!

Since I made her do Latin, I told her that she could decide what foreign language she wanted to learn.

I tried my hardest to steer her towards Russian or German.

Try as I might, it didn't work. She chose French. I don't like French much - they leave off half of the word when pronouncing it! I let her have her way though, because I wanted her to love learning it.

Outcome: She is MISERABLE learning French.
We chose to use Breaking the French Barrier and she is struggling with it. She did fine for the first ten "steps" before the actual lessons started. They included colors, numbers, telling time, weather, and other basic stuff like that.

When the lessons started and it jumped right into conjugating verbs she wanted to cry. I feel like the exercises ask questions that she doesn't know how to answer (ie. vocab that she hasn't learned yet).

There have also been a few questions that I just can't fathom why they put into a children's workbook - (ie. At what time does Desperate Housewives start? and some other questions that she couldn't answer unless she knew information about actors/movies. She didn't know who/what Meryl Streep was and didn't know that she was in The Devil Wears Prada). Pop-culture should not be a requirement to learn French and the whole Desperate Housewives thing is totally inappropriate in my opinion.

So, she has now agreed to switch to German or Russian. (Of course this is AFTER I have spent money on this French program and some great French readers with CDs). I am at a loss for what to do. I would love to do Russian, but I am afraid that it will be super hard since it uses a different alphabet - and there isn't a lot of material available for children learning Russian. Looks like it might be German :)

Decisions, decisions....