We eased into starting school this year. Over the week of August 29th to September 30th we began our history reading and had our first day of Classical Conversations. We're using Beautiful Feet Books' Medieval History set which is mostly literature we'll read aloud together, with some textbook chapters to tie it all together. The medieval focus is to coincide with the Classical Conversations history we'll be doing this year in Cycle 2. The first week we read the introduction and first chapters of The European World 400-1450 (the textbook) and we read Beowulf by Michael Morpurgo. Beowulf was delightful with its lyrical alliterations and we were all very much swept away by the story. Finally, we painted our world map and marked some important countries, cities, and rivers.
On Tuesday of that week we met friends at the ice cream shop for giant scoops of ice cream to say good-bye to summer and kick off the CC season we'd all be starting the next day together.
The kids all had fun sharing their giant ice creams and playing together at the park across the street afterwards. Don't worry, it's okay to climb!
The first day of CC was the next day, August 31st. This was when we decided to take our official first day of school pictures. Evan is a 6th grader, Micah is a 5th grader, and Natalie is a 3rd grader.
I'm teaching a different class at CC this year. It's the 1pm-3pm Essentials class for our 4th-6th graders covering Essentials of the English Language (grammar) and Writing Structure and Style. We reached and exceeded the class size limit at our campus, so we have two Essentials classes this year and I'm teaching the 2nd-3rd tour families (ones that have been through the course at least once before), which includes my boys. I was rather nervous on the first day but everything went fine!
Happy 1st day tea from one of my students and Natalie with her best friend Caryss in their matching dresses.
Our campus is now over 90 people. This is the group photo we did for the yearbook.
And this is my Essentials class!
Lastly, we started our full load of work at home on Monday, September 5th. Yes, it was Labor Day and yes, Isaac was around. The kids are using Teaching Textbooks (all bumped up at least one grade level because TT is considered a little behind) for math again this year, but without the CD-ROMS because they despise those. They all have their own science textbook to read alone; this was hard for me because I want every subject to be some big, wonderful thing we do together, but that is just not realistic. I chose history as our big "together" topic and let science go. They have daily geography exercises and a lot of geography in our history curriculum too. We're doing a catechism devotional with Bible reading at night with Isaac. They all have a grammar/spelling/punctuation book to do as well. Together we're practicing CC memory work, Greek and Latin roots, and whatever else (right now it's the major north/south and east/west streets in our city) first thing after breakfast. The boys have plenty of homework from Essentials. I tried to pare down our basics so that there is time for getting outside, attending field trips, going to book club, or just having time available for pursuing interests without feeling horrible pressure because there is so much book work.
I'll leave you with this... The boys quietly, independently writing their own key word outlines for their papers. I can't tell you how this made my heart soar with joy.
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