Our Roman Arch Worked!

Okay, this is from week 6 in RTR. I was skeptical, but... Whoo-hooo! Now, I didn't have cereal boxes, so we used those corrugated cardboard bricks for our "base." And, by the time we were finished, the bricks were only 5 3/4 inches apart, rather than 6 1/2, but it is staying all by itself!

I have more to post about our last couple of weeks, but I was just too excited about this!

RTR Week 3

The first day had a little bit of stuff from How the Bible Came to Us, so we did that the evening before, but the rest of it has been basically memorizing the books of the New Testament and just looking up a few verses from those books, so we've been doing those in the morning. It's great getting a brief summary of each book and who (possibly) wrote it.

We're continuing in August Caesar's World for history, along with tidbits from The Roman Empire. I've had to reword a few things from the former to soften them for Rabbit. Yesterday we did the mosaic project. We used construction paper and foam squares (I had some from many moons ago), and it ended up looking like this:

Cutting up construction paper into little squares just didn't appeal to me, so I felt like this was a good substitute. I need to print out the picture for Rabbit to add to her history notebook.

We've continued learning more about the Brain this week. It is so neat how God designed our bodies.

For our Latin Roots test, I made up addition and subtraction problems in Latin and had her write her answers in Latin. I figured that was better than a matching test. We're still on numbers at this point.

Over all, a pretty good week, except Rabbit hates Math again. But, I think we're just going to keep at it.

MFW 1st - up to about day 20

Okay, so my boys are always surprising me.

We're finally up to learning long vowel sounds - long a (spelled a-consonant-e) and long e (spelled e-consonant-e and ee). When we did long a, Tigger did great. Pooh did okay, but he caught on. I played reading games that afternoon with both of them, and then that evening I worked with Pooh one-on-one. Then the next day we did long e. Pooh really struggled with it. He was on the verge of tears a couple of times. Tigger did fine. Then, that afternoon we played a couple of reading games. Pooh really worked hard to read the words correctly. It might take him several seconds to think about it, but he read most of them correctly. Tigger, on the other hand, kept missing them. I was a bit suspicious, though, that he was missing them so I would play a reading game with him one-on-one.

So, needing "Exploration Day" to land on Wednesday, we took a few days off following the MFW 1st grade manual and just spent time each day reading books, playing reading games, doing fun little math things, etc. Yesterday, we were playing reading games and Tigger kept missing words I knew he read the day before. Then he finally said, "You're going to have to play games with me tonight, because I keep missing words." A-ha! I knew it!

Today we picked it back up (as it was finally Wednesday), and did our Exploration Day. We started with verses, and then looking at a picture in the red Come Look with Me book, reviewed our science book, read some of our library books, played with Pattern Blocks, and played a reading game. For the reading game, I had the boys spread the cards around the room and then I would call out a word for them to find. Pooh did better than Tigger at this, which really surprised me. They LOVED this game. In fact, it was really hard to calm them down to get them ready for P.E. class.

We'll be ready to start back at day 21 tomorrow.

RTR Week 2

Whew, I need to get caught up.

We've been doing most of the Bible the night before so Dad can join in. It's been interesting learning how books got started, and even writing. You do have to wonder how much if it is "right," though. I mean, no one we know personally was there.

This week we started August Caesar's World. Not sure what to make of the book. I enjoy it, and the writing is good. Rabbit is having a hard time with it because of all the mentioning of other "gods." I'm really having to filter for her. One day we had the opportunity to play "Odd or Even" and even the boys enjoyed that.

In science we've been learning about nerves and how the brain works. There have been some good experiments or demonstrations to try to show how it works. It's pretty cool.

The drawing lessons in God and the History of Art have been good - we've been learning about perspective. I think this will help Rabbit's drawing.

So far, in English from the Roots Up we're just covering numbers in Latin. It's pretty easy, because it lines up with Spanish pretty well, and we've been studying Spanish since 1st grade.

Otherwise, not a bad week. I'm learning bunches.