We officially started homeschooling on Monday. And I feel like I’ve started a full time job… because I have.

What We Studied

Overall, we managed to get a great start on all our subjects. I’m hoping to keep the momentum up into next week.

Literature and Poetry

We started reading The Tale of the Despereaux for our literature selection. We will be continuing this read aloud into next week.

• The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Math

We started Singapore Math 1A Common Core edition and realized very quickly that Arthur knows the entire book. So we’re going to treat 1A as a review. In our first week, we have reviewed and worked through Units 1-3. Good thing that I bought 1B two weeks ago. We’ll be there by week 3. We also have daily ELA and Math pages that we are doing. The above page will make an appearance a few times a week. Each time, I will pick a random number to work through. Arthur really likes working with numbers.

Social Studies

We didn’t have a formal history unit this week, but we did do some map skills work. We read some books about maps, did some review about maps, and created a few maps of our own. This was a nice easy start to our social studies year.

• Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney

• Follow that Map by Scot Richie

• A Child’s Introduction to the World by Heather Alexander

• Geography A to Z by Jack Knowlton

Science

For science, we started a few different things. We started Blossom and Root’s Charles Darwin Book Seed. The boys learned about Darwin and aspects of evolution and natural selection. The kids really got into a lesson about beak adaptations amongst birds. We also started working through the Nature Connection book for our basic nature science. And we reviewed some basic concepts relating to doing science and being a scientist.

• Charles Darwin’s Around the World Adventure by Jennifer Thermes

Art

Our art projects were related to our unit theme or science this week. My personal favorite was our watercolor resist iguanas for our Charles Darwin unit.

Music

We started listening to Classic for Kids podcast. My plan is to choose one composer each week. We will listen to the podcast episodes and then do a small listening journaling with a few of the composer’s famous pieces. This week we listened to Aaron Copland. Arthur’s (and my) favorite piece was “Appalachian Spring. “ He seems to really enjoy this subject.

• Barn Dance by Pat Hutchins

Faux Tinkergarten Nature Play Day (not sure what I want to call this)

Every Wednesday, we plan on having a friend and her daughter over for some lessons and play time. The little girl is 2, so we’re doing activities that can involve all three kids (and ages). We'll probably tweak the schedule in the next few weeks, but this first one went pretty well. We started with a science lesson, created a nature journal and talked about being a naturalist. We went on a walk around our yard investigating. The kids really seemed to enjoy themselves.

Then we came back inside to do a few art projects. We made watercolor resist iguanas (part of the Darwin unit) and did a more open-ended art lesson about the month of August.

Finally, we read a few Mo Willems books and created a paper plate Piggie while Arthur made a bus for our pigeon, duckling, and bus driver cutouts.

So much fun! We had lunch and the kids got to play for awhile. So nice during this quarantine time.

• A Big Garden by Gilles Clement

Unit Theme

Our unit theme was Mo Willems. We ended up reading almost every Mo Williems book and doing some fun activities. This was our easing into school unit. I purposefully picked a theme that I knew the kids would love. We love the pigeon in this house!

• All the Mo Willems books

Misc.

Every morning we started our day with the calendar and a podcast. We started (and are loving) The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd. Plus we listened to a episode of WOW in the World (Arthur really loves) and an episode of Tumble Science (less of a fan). Quentin worked with the letter A this week. He got into the Letter A song, daubing the various papers with the Bingo daubers, and reading the alphabet books.

• A Busy Creature’s Day Eating by Mo Willems

Highs

• Decent attitudes all through the week. I was concerned with Arthur, but we only had a few small meltdowns. I’d say this week was a win.

• Quentin is excited to do his letter work. We don’t do a ton, but we’re focusing on one letter every week. He really got into doing some fun things associated with the Letter A.

• Our faux Tinkergarten Wednesday with a friend was a big hit! All the kids seemed to enjoy themselves and I got to spend time with a friend. Looking forward to our next time.

• Not so much a high point, but an exciting point. Right as we started school on Monday, a derecho storm blew through our area. It was over and done with in 15 minutes, but it was a scary 15 minutes with very high wind gusts.

Lows

• I’m so tired… seriously. We had a very lax routine throughout the summer. We added more things and it’s taking more work for me to prep everything. I know that things will get better as we settle in.

• Friday we ran out of steam in the afternoon. Not a huge deal, but it meant that we ended up doing some science on Saturday morning.

Next Week

We are starting our more formal history curriculum next week with History Quest. Before we dive into a time period, we are going to talk about the concepts of history, archaeology and then evolution. In addition, we will be finishing our Book Seed: Profile in Science Charles Darwin unit and The Tale of Despereaux read aloud. For our unit theme, we are going to study colors. This will be a huge part of our Wednesday day. Quentin will be covering the Letter B.

Next up on the TBR pile: