“Latin’s a dead language, as dead as dead can be…”
“It killed off all the Romans, and now it’s killing ME!!!!”
My dear English cousin taught my kids this chant last year, and my middle two chanted it over and over all week long. (Thanks John!! Grrr….hehe)
We started school again this week, and although it doesn’t seem like we got much done amidst a variety of interruptions and appointments, things actually went pretty well. Here are our highlights…
Kyla decided that she didn’t like the history selection we chose over the summer, so we’re going to look for something else over the weekend. Her absolute FAVORITES are Traditional Logic, by Memoria Press, and Wheelock’s Latin. I have a soft spot for ol’ Wheelock, since it’s what I used as a freshman classics major in college. She really, really got into translating sentences. After five years of “fun” Latin, she was definitely ready to buckle down and get serious. We also dropped Teaching Textbooks Algebra, which we’d used last year, in favor of Life of Fred. Lastly, we found the Teaching Company’s course on “Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature’s Most Fantastic Works,” and Kyla immediately decided that looked FAR more interesting than the reading list we’d agonized over, and I agreed with her! Considering that many of our selections are covered in the course, it’ll be a good fit.
Kiera is a bit of a handful. She’s a very bright kid, but is usually content to do the bare minimum required, and needs quite a bit of supervision to stay on task. She’s easily distracted by noise, and is particularly vulnerable to Declan’s schooltime cuteness. If I don’t watch her closely, she’ll take two hours to do her math because she keeps stopping to play with Decky. She likes workbooks, as much as I hate them, and sometimes I wonder if she’d be better off just using all workbooks for things, so she’d know just how much she had to do before she was done. I also struggle with my expectations for her, because I really don’t feel comfortable with how much is required of a 5th grader in school.
This week, she did some decimal review in Singapore Math, some grammar review, some Latin review and did some reading for history. She also did a few pages in her Can-Do Cursive book. My goals for her this year are to get her writing more comfortably, and to teach her how to type and use a word processor. Kyla tends to dominate the kids’ computer with her digital art, but Kiera needs to start getting equal time.
Dari is struggling with reading. I started him back at the beginning of Hooked On Phonics Level 1, and we’ve reviewed up to mid-way through the orange book. I’m going to have him evaluated this year if he continues to struggle, because we have a family history of learning disabilities, and I want to rule that out early on. If he’s just developing a little slower than his sisters, that’s fine, but I learned with Declan that intervening early can make all the difference. He’s doing very well in Singapore Math, and he LOVES Hillyer’s “A Child’s History of the World.” I bought the Calvert course, which has some enrichment activities and outlines to fill in for each story and we do those orally. Yesterday, we read about cave paintings, looked at some photos of Lascaux online, and then Dari and Decky made their own cave paintings with brown paper bags and some paints. He’s also really enjoying D’Aulaire’s Norse myths (which he choose to read before the Greek myths), and Armstrong’s “The American Story.” We read several chapters in both. For the Norse myths, he’s drawing pictures in a Mead Primary Journal composition notebook, and then copying a sentence from the story on the lines below it. Next week, we’ll start Song School Latin.
Declan had fun watching his siblings, hanging from desks, climbing baby gates, watching the Wiggles on his portable DVD player, playing with Little People, building Legos, and visiting with his speech and occupational therapists. He also took to wearing his bike helmet around the house, and insisting to everyone that he was “Going biking!” (In the photo below, he had used a glue stick all over his forehead, so Kiera wrote a note that said, “I’m a goofball” and stuck it on there. He was quite proud of it for about 15 minutes! hehe)
In all, not a bad first week.
