Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Trial Run with the younger set

I affectionately call my younger two "the littles" and my older two "the bigs".  Poor Ian is the middle child and can be lumped into either category given the event.  This school year he will be part of "the littles".  This in no way indicates he is doing "little" work.  He will be doing grade level work if not above.  This year I have the littles using My Father's World 1850-Modern times (portions of it).  We took a break from Sonlight as a whole and are trying something new, not because Sonlight wasn't working for us but because I was burnt out on Core 3 and juggling more than one core.  With MFW I can instruct all three in the area of history.  I am using a different Bible curriculum than MFW but again all three will be using it.  Apologia Who Is GOd?  is what we will be using.  I did a review on it for TOS last year and liked it enough to pull into our school year.  I ordered the notebooking journals as well.  I am also using Apologia Exploring Creation with Anatomy for science.

Today I am doing a trial run of the first day.  My bigs are away at church bootcamp so I have my littles undistracted.  I gave them the option of which subject to start with and they chose math.  We started with our Classical Conversation math facts.  This is how it went down
Avery skip counted by 2's to 24 and skip counted by 3's to 36
Neil did the 3's times tables
Ian did the 4's times tables.
They all listened in while the others recited, gotta love the one room school house set up.
I then set the timer for 30 minutes and had Avery work in some old workbooks I found while cleaning out the school room.  Mostly addition and other simple stuff to keep her brain working.  Neil corrected and rewrote some tests from the end of last year that I couldn't read :/  Ian wrote out the times tables 1-4.  The timer rang and they voted for History next.
I printed out 3 US maps and gave them a pretest.
Avery got 5/50
Neil got 12/50
Ian got 28/50

Being a pretest I was glad to see lots of room for improvement.  It means they won't be bored as we learn some states this year.  So with those results in hand we move on in our history lesson to the Northern States Song and some history review.  A little later we will hit the store for some colonial cooking supplies and eat something from the past.

This post is mostly for me to look back on as we tackle this new journey with a new curriculum and some piecing together of some other subjects all while doing Classical Conversations.

2 comments:

Leslie said...

Sounds like a great day! I plan to pull in some CC memorization stuff as we do Cores 6 & 2 this next school year. Are the geography songs on the CDs? Where did you get the math facts/skip counting stuff from CC as well?

Traci said...

Leslie,
The states songs and capitals cd I got at Rainbow resource. Veritas timeline cards and the CC memory flashcards I picked up at the practicum. The timeline cards are also available at RR but the CC flashcards are only available through CC. They also sell an audio CD with all the sentences etc set to song.