What we've been up to

We've been taking it easy on the academics this month, mostly just so I can finish up my planning and shopping. We still have daily Latin, lots of reading (but in our house that's a given), Art on fridays ,and prehistory 4 days a week for about an hour. I plan to ease back into a full schedule by August 1.

I haven't kept track, but I'd venture to say I have spent several pleasant hours a day just in researching and hunting down the perfect resources online, and perusing catalogs and placing orders. It has been like Christmas for me, opening all the packages and playing with everything and getting it organized. The kids are insane with jealousy since I won't let them mess with anything yet.

I've been able to buy so many cool things this year, especially for prehistory. In addition to tons of cool books, especially magic school bus and Lets-read-and-find-out science books, I got to buy super-cool hands-on things like fossils , seashells, and dried sea life to identify, sort and match and lay out chronologically in our timeline of life activities, rocks and minerals kits, geodes to break, owl pellets, dinosaur shrimp and dinosaur plants, coloring books , and tapes...it's been so much fun getting back into science.

I don't know how it happened, but science definately fell by the wayside last year.

That's not to say we did nothing, we spent a lot of time on ancient scientists and mathematicians like Archimedes and Pythagorus, we did a few experiments from the bubbleology science in a nutshell , did quite a bit of nature study through the spring, and used our microscope to look at everything we could get our hands on, including Scote's sea monkeys, but by making science Scote's focus for the year (as the history is for Dodo) it's given me the oppotunity to really focus and delve in deep, and spend more money on it. Prehistory is Scote's main focus this year, along with finishing up advanced phonics, spelling, and math.

The kids have been watching me plan for weeks so they were very eager to begin, so this is actually our third week doing prehistory. Of course, the term pre-history is misleading, our first two weeks were really focused on Astronomy and Physics. We covered the big bang and birth of universe, gravity and forces, a tiny bit of chemistry, stellar evolution, solar system, what causes day/night etc, and the moon cycles.

This week we began Unit two, which focuses on the birth of the earth... Geology and Earth Sciences. We are in the Hadean Time on our clock of eras and the kids are learning about volcanoes, the composition of the earth, how mountains are made, the types of mountains...and that is just this week!

I am really glad I decided to do this, the kids are really into the science and Scote's writing and narrations are improving dramatically from the daily practice. Once we are done I have no doubt he will be ready for SOTW.