Colloquium 2019-2020


New to our homeschool this year, Colloquium meetings were designed for Nature Angel and Little Princess to combine some of their studies under my direction after the co-op we'd signed up for dissolved for reasons beyond our control.

Our plans were grand:
     1.  American History:  Our Star-Spangled Story--the text and all of the trappings that go with it     
          (Mister Man was going to join us for these lessons)
     2.  Human Anatomy:  Apologia Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and Physiology
     3.  Greek Mythology:  D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths and the Memoria Press study guide

And we had a good start with extra literature, science experiments, activities, and everything!

Jello cells

Then Life happened--mostly in the form of Brother's incredibly intense psychiatric needs.

Writing with fewer joints . . . it's pretty hard!

So we moved to Plan B.

First we dumped everything but Greek Mythology.  We read the stories, memorized the gods and goddesses, filled out the study guide, took the tests, and had a grand time together.

Nothing picture-worthy--just lots of reading, talking, and laughing.

Then we focused entirely on American History.  We released Mister Man from joining us; we dumped the activity books and notetaking; we just read, talked, researched, and discovered cool stuff together.

And we never picked up Human Anatomy.  I showed them some videos of white blood cells that seemed to really interest them.  Another day I showed them a video of the human digestive tract--from biting to elimination.

They were horrified and said they never wanted to see such things again.

Oops.

We did begin an Astronomy course together. 

Looking at the surface of the moon

But when night after night was cloudy or too moonlit or too wet or too whatever AND we had our Camp Busy Bees, we lost momentum.

The days are getting shorter.

I think we'll start again soon.

Star-gazing one late spring night
But if we don't, we'll certainly do it for Colloquium 2020-2021.

Comments

  1. WendyJuly 12, 2020 at 3:03 PM

    I love the Greek myths and Astronomy. I love history. I think I would love your Colloquium. I hope you can continue to star gaze. Is your telescope strong enough to see the nebulae? Check out Orion. He’s got some great things to see.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JudyJuly 13, 2020 at 7:22 AM

    Such cuties!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anne's Day in the Life: 17, 16, 12, 10, 9, 8, 8, 7, 5, & 5

Image
This is my crew last summer--the day we said goodbye to Pixie as she headed off to college. I actually have all 12 of my children home right now. Rose Red is nearly 20, graduated from our homeschool a year and a half ago, lives at home, and is working as a server at Applebee's as she tries to understand what it means to be an adult. Pixie is newly 18, graduated from our homeschool almost a year ago, is a dance major at BYUI, and is spending her off-track semester working full-time in the 1-year-old room at a daycare. These two still are part of our family days, and their schedules directly impact the rest of us, but I am no longer responsible for their day-to-day educational needs. The remaining 10 are still under my educational supervision.  Among these 10 children we are schooling while we cope with anxiety, depression, FASD, ADHD, DMDD, ODD, ASD, PTSD, and Intellectual Disability. Here is a February Wednesday in our lives. 5:04 am :  Sir Walter Scott's al
Read more

Review: Drive Thru History® – “The Gospels”

Image
We are total Drive Thru History® fans around here.  We discovered Dave Stotts and his awesome video series years ago, and we've watched them enthusiastically ever since.  The videos are informative, interesting, and funny, so we jumped quickly at the opportunity to review the newest series:   Drive Thru History® – “The Gospels." And it definitely makes the grade. Because this new series focuses on the gospels, we opted to make watching it the focus of our Family Home Evening on Sundays. The timing of our review period was such that we were enjoying the lessons in the weeks leading to Easter. How cool is that!?! The series has 18 episodes, beginning with background information about Judea before Christ's birth, exploring the annunciation, His birth, His childhood, all kinds of aspects of His ministry, through His trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, finally ending with a summary of the prophecies and power of His ministry and thought-provoking qu
Read more

The Second Week

Image
This week was a lot like last week. We didn't make any progress introducing new subjects, but we got better at what we are already doing. We got better at listening to music--3 times this week!  We don't much like Bach's St. Matthew Passion, but we are quite fond of the Brandenburg Concertos .  (This could be my influence, as I've always preferred a concerto to a cantata.) We got better at reviewing our bulletin boards. (Now I need to get new board information ready!) We finished How to Behave and Why on Monday, and we read this book several times during the week.  Along with our readings, we had discussions about the lessons taught and the values of the culture represented in the story.  I also began to pause in places and turn over the storytelling to the kids. For zoology, we watched a great video about elephants .   And we started this book. We're only 30-ish pages into it, but we're really curious about where it's going. I assigned the kids to researc
Read more