We're Growing in Ways that Delight Me

It's so cold outside.

And it's so cozy inside.

And we have uninterrupted hours in which to do school.

I am very happy.

The teens and I finished up our American Literature text with a few modern poets.  When I finally find my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (or borrow it from the library), we'll read that and call our American Literature course completed. 

We plowed through several more lessons in Mystery of History vol. 4.  My favorite is when the lesson reviews are games/activities that allow the girls to get up and move around and go through their notes really thoroughly.

This was one of those reviews.

The younger kids and I finished Across Five Aprils, which wrapped up our study of The Civil War.  I feel like the kids learned and thought a lot about the issues--we certainly had both lively and sobering discussions!

We also finished Charlotte's Web.  

It never fails to touch our hearts.

So worthwhile to reread!

We read King Lear from Shakespeare Stories.  I told the kids that a Shakespearean tragedy is a story that ends with a stage full of dead bodies, while a comedy ends with a wedding.

We kept a body count as we read.🤣

They're interested in watching productions of the plays we're reading, and I'm looking them up.  Our HDMI cable connection is bad between our computer and TV (our TV is at least 10 years old), so I've been slow to actually show the videos, but I really want to show them to the kids!

I'm continuing to explore Under the Home for lessons that will enrich our homeschool, and I'm happily finding them.  This week, we completed:

     1.  Grade 3 Art Appreciation Lesson 2

     2.  Grade 3 Geography Lessons 1 and 2

     3.  Kinder Music Appreciation Lesson 17

     4.  Kinder Studio Art Lessons 1 and 2

It seems silly for me to use Kinder lessons, but I have kids that HATE art and cry every time I put an art lesson on the agenda.  These lessons are taking art to a beautifully basic place that my art lovers can experiment with, and my art haters can just do-it-and-get-it-over-with, but I still have a hope they might develop some affection for their productions.  For Studio Art lesson 2, I added a couple of YouTube videos about making clouds with watercolors that gave my art lovers something to sink their teeth into.  

And the music at every level is gorgeous!  We jumped into "Winter" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and it's perfect for us.  

For science, we read about alchemy as the bridge between ancient and modern chemistry, and then we started a chapter about Robert Boyle.

We're studying westward expansion now for history, and we're starting with Davy Crockett, even though he's pre-Civil War.  I figure as long as we're learning about settlers opening and moving west, we're covering the spirit and flavor of the 1800s.  We've got Little House in the Big Woods, Sing Down the Moon, and a couple of other good reads on our list for this unit.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of really good reads we could choose, so I pulled a few from our own shelves, and I'm calling it good for now.

Because we finished The Civil War on Wednesday, and we had American Rhythm on Thursday, I started Westward Expansion with a story from a book I got for free at a homeschool carnival some years ago.

It's a classroom teacher text, but the stories are quite good, and we flipped to the middle to enjoy a story about an effort to introduce camels to the American West.

Seemed to us as we read that camels should have found a good home here as useful trade and travel animals, but Americans were all about beauty instead of practicality, so the camels didn't stand a chance.

Baymax got a digital camera for his birthday recently (all of my kids are double digits now!), and he's been taking pictures and experimenting with his camera settings every waking hour.

Here's flipping through all of his pictures so that I can admire them.

Little Princess headed off to Junior Officer Academy for Civil Air Patrol this weekend.  We'll pick her up in a couple of hours.

Without a working van, we haven't been able to go anywhere on hikes, and I know we took some walks this week, but I never took any pictures while we were out.  

The boys played football in the icy snow with friends several times . . . and those afternoons--when we've had a great morning of reading together, there's a fire burning in the fireplace while I make homemade soup and bread for dinner, and the boys are whooping and hollering while they exercise outside--are my favorite kind of winter afternoon.