Weekly Wrap-Up: Back to School

Well it's our first official Weekly Wrap-Up of the new school year. School has begun and my baby is a fourth grader. Where does the time go?

Our first week went pretty well. We're starting off slowly, I haven't added in all of our subjects and I left one day open for summer outings. It went with only a couple of glitches. Even wee Babe was relatively well behaved. For her.

We started off with a unit on South America using a South America Geography Unit by Evan Moor and reading about Simon Bolivar and Jan Matzeliger. Reading about Matzeliger in Shoes for Everyone has been particularly interesting. It's about a half black South American inventor who came to the U.S. for more opportunities. It documents his struggles with prejudice ten years after the Civil War. We were most saddened with how he was treated when he was looking for a church in Massachusetts. It was a good lesson in how important it is to take what you learn in God's Word and put it into action. Mackenzie got a much clearer picture of what it means to let your light shine for Jesus.

Our other Sonlight reading includes Moccasin Trail and By the Great Horn Spoon. Both are great books that show the importance of family and what life in early America was like. Moccasin Trail, in particular, teaches a lot about the exceptance of other cultures.

We started The Star-Spangled State Book as our main geography curriculum this year. Mackenzie seems to be enjoying it and she did great on her first quiz. And, with the way it's set up, she's totally self-suffient with it. She calls it "fun."

We even remembered to do our Sonlight mapping assignments and put in our timeline figures for the week. Those were two things we forgot to do a lot last year. LOL

We started our first lesson in Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the 5th Day . Our first lesson is covering What is Zoology and she's been learning about how and why scientists classify animals. We also started our Learn 'N Folders that we got to go along with it. It's a cross between notebooking and lapbooking. We opted to do this instead of the standard notebook pages that accompany the study.

Math and language arts were review so nothing much to report there. Apparently she didn't forgot much of her math as she aced her first test. We haven't started spelling yet. Maybe next week or the week after.

For art this week we used How to Teach Art to Children and we studied lines. It was a nice review from what we studied in I Can Do All Things. There are things that I like about both curriculums so I'm alternating between them.

Here she is sharing her "strawberry" that she made during her free time. LOL

We have yet to start our artist/composer studies and spanish. We're going to start studying Mary Cassatt next week I think. This year she will be making a notebook about the artists and composers. Hopefully we won't get off track. =o)

So, all-in-all, we had a great first week. We even had time to catch a movie with friends and a couple of play dates. Not a bad way to start the year.

Be sure to check out what others are doing over at the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris.