Weekly Wrap Up

     Our week has been a great week. My children have been exceptionally good students for the beginning of our new school year, (We'll see if that lasts for the year). My son wanted to lag around once or twice, but he soon got with the program and things moved on along. If they work the rest of our year like they have worked this week I will be one happy Mamma.
     I started my daughter this week in the Simply Grammar & my son in Writing Strands 3. Both seemed to have enjoyed their lesson. Next week we will switch the books around and they will work out of the opposite book from what they were working with this week. This will give them both an opportunity to learn grammar and increase their writing skills. I'm not real sure if this is more Grammar & Composition than what Charlotte Mason would have her students to do in one year, but I feel like my children are ready for this. So we will just take our time working through the books and if it becomes too much of a load then we'll change our game plan.
     I suppose I should blog about the highlight (or what my son would probably say was the highlight) of our week was. Our poet this term is Carl Sandburg. We are reading a biography on him,reading some of his poems, and Memmorizing one of them for recitation,along with analyzing that particular poem. When I say analyze, I mean we read it very carefully and then each of us give our interpretation of it. Then we look to see if there are any words that we aren't quite sure of the meaning. If so, we turn our papers over and write the word on the back of our poem. On another day we come back to those words and look them up in the dictionary.  We then read the poem again and discuss it since we've found out more insight on it. By this time we all are beginning to have a better understanding of what the poet was trying to portray. We are starting to recognize how he/she might have been feeling, noticing their surroundings, etc. I feel like that gives them a general idea of what the poem is about.
     Anyway, enough about how we do our poetry study, let me get back to my son's highlight of the week. If he doesn't learn anythingg about the poet, the poem, any definitions, etc. I'm sure he can tell me how to call pigs to the feed trough. In our biography it told how Carl Sandburg kept calling his cousins pigs to the feed trough just because he thought it was funny. He thought it was funny because he didn't have any food when he was calling them. It just told how the pigs kept coming and running, their tongues hanging out from exhaustion, but because he thought it was a funny sight he just kept on and on. I suppose my son could picture this in his mind because every time he would try to read again he would start chuckling all over again. I'm sure he learned how to call pigs this week. I can make a notation, he has learned something else.
    Oh my, I'm rambling on and on, you are home school Mammas. You have more to do than staying here reading my novel. So I'll go for now. More musings later. Have a happy home school week!

Too Much Animal Science Can Be Embarrassing

     Today we had a busy day. First was dental appointments. Second to the library. And last was to purchase school supplies. Over all, it was a lovely day.

     While we were at the library my DC pulled poetry books from the shelf and copied a poem in their Copy Work composition books. This was their first Copy Work for the new year. They did their Copy Work page a bit different than we did them last year. Last year we just copied them on regular notebook paper or printed us some notebooking pages with pretty pictures on them. Today they chose to do their own art work on the page. We had bought them some colored gel pens so they wanted to try their hands in pen and ink drawing. I was so proud of their work. It really was good. Our Copy Work books will be very personalized this year if they keep this up.

     O.K. now for my title. While we were out shopping for supplies my DD decides she has to go to the restroom. I don't know that she decides this. So I ask my DS where she was. (Let me remind you, we are in a store where there are people within hearing distance.) And this was my DS's answer to my question. "She had to go scat." I immediately told him to hush, hoping no one had heard him. At some point and time in the midst of this my DD had walked back up and just fell right in the conversation by saying, "Don't worry Mama, I didn't leave any tracks." I knew then we had studied tracking animals just a little too much because I could have crawled under something. I can only imagine what others thought if they heard them. We joke around all the time at home about things we have learned, but that was not the time nor the place. I guess I should look on the bright side of things, they are definitely learning, many things.

More excitement or embarrassment later, Traci