Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The post I was going to write this weekend...

Or what could have been titled "Sailey Homeschool Happenings Week 1"
Alas! I was to wrapped up in museum trips and laundry to make that happen.....so here we are on a Tuesday afternoon.

Week 1 went pretty well.

We are back to Sonlight and I'm back to wanting to choke who ever picks their read-alouds. We are reading Moccasin Trail and Ava and I both hate it. She thinks it's boring and I find nothing more annoying than having to read this ...


" Like when the Comanches was chasin' us, or we'd git our horses stole and have to git arrers in us stealin' 'em back agin, or we didn't dare show a f'ar and have to eat our meat raw. Fust time I eat raw prairie dog, by gor  I wisht fer my mother, and felt mean I ever run off and left her. I missed her other times, too, and I missed Johnnie mighty bad. But I was skeered to go back 'cause my pa'd of beat the living daylights out'n me"


Much like I'd like to beat the living daylights out of the person that chose this book! Devlin likes it and so we are going to struggle through it. I can only hope the selections will get better.
As an aside....if people really talked like this in the Wild West why don't they anymore? I find it really hard to believe that everyone went around twanged out and adding apostrophes to everything they said. SO ANNOYING!


Our History book is about William Wilberforce and how he helped abolish slavery in Great Britian without starting a war. We are really enjoying that. Our 5th day book is Sounding Forth the Trumpet (might be Sound Forth but whatever) It amazes me how much of this book I have been instructed by Sonlight to edit out because the authors were trying to deliver a biased viewpoint. Followed by pages of explanation from Sonlight as to the why's and how's. Why choose this book? Again baffled.

Now we move onto Language Arts. Devlin is using Sonlight's LA which we are now forced to buy with every core. I added in Grammar Ace as suggested and it's a good thing I did. I am finding the content extremely light. It hardly takes him any time at all to complete the assignments. Of course he's perfectly OK with this. Me...not so much. I'm keeping my eye on how things progress...

We started something new this year. It's a writing program called IEW. It cost a pretty penny and I'm happy to say I LOVE it! Ava had a bit of a rough start. Her artistic side was definitely showing. Happily I had Stef to text thus avoiding me blowing an eyeball. We watched the lesson, did the 'key-word outline' wrote the rough draft all on the 1st day. That took FOREVER! I'm really hoping every lesson day won't be like that. Otherwise I really like it. It makes sense and I'm excited to see how things unfold as we add more lessons in.
Her paragraph was pretty darn good. 
Devlin's was awesome! So far it's money well spent!

Devlin's trying Teaching Textbooks Math this year and so far he really likes it. It's completely student led so I really like it too! Here he is doing it on the school laptop....thanks Ray for making money and buying us things like laptops and head phones.;)

We also started Switched on Schoolhouse's Elementary Spanish.

I'm not sure how I feel about it yet since they have only done 2 lessons. I do like that the pointer finger, when low enough on the screen that you can't see the hand it's attached too, looks like a tiny penis. Makes me smirk every time.
Another new elective for us is Mark Kistler's Draw Squad. I LOVE IT! One lesson a week and really we were drawing in the 1st lesson. Even Devlin liked it.
Here's a pic of the book in case you want to check it out and next to the book is Ava's page with her little drawing's...I've already been asked when we are doing it again. So that's a win for me.

To wrap up the week Ava decided to make us some cookies. I went for the no bake option since I knew she would bore quickly and I would be left finishing the baking. She did a great job! They were delish!
The ones we made are called 'Gorilla Poops" They loved that lol.

Ava had her last summer Art lesson with Mrs.Southern on Tuesday. She's been working on a clay box that has yet to be fired so we're in a holding pattern on that. I can't wait to see it. She's always inspired to create after spending time with Mrs.Southern and I can really see her art changing and her abilities growing.
Here she is at the table painting.

So all in all it was a great week back. I pray the rest of our school year is just as good.

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