First week of school

 Our first week of school 2012-2013!!

We've had a great first week of school.  As promised, I'm going to keep you all up-to-date on our new curriculum, Trail Guide to Learning, Paths of Settlement.   I really thought my 12 year old would really not be happy about the curriculum change, but so far this week he's really done well and had a good attitude for the most part.  He enjoys history, and since this curriculum in centered around certain historical periods, he seems to be enjoying learning about actual people during those periods.  Annagrace loves to try anything different, so she's been pretty happy too.  We are still trying to get our "flow" of the work down, but I'm sure with time it will all come together.  Will is using the middle school supplement and that keeps him busy while Annagrace finishes up certain things.  I could see the benefit of having two books of certain books.  Example, when they are doing state work, it would be a help to have two of the Atlas books, so I may try and order us another one of those.  Other than that, having only one copy of each book is working for us, while one is doing individual reading, or copywork in one book, the other is reading in another book.  Hope that makes sense to you all....  (if you're familiar with TGTL you'll understand). With only one week in it's really hard to tell how this is going to really work for us. However, with that said, I'm really enjoying working with them together.  In the past I've felt so pulled, back-and-forth between the two of them,  trying to work with this one on history, then reading with that one.  With the TGTL we all seem to be "more on the same page". 

Nathan, my 3 year old,he's done really well this week.  Usually early in the morning after breakfast he will sit quietly and watch a little TV, which is working well while we do our copy work and dictation.  By the time we start read-aloud time, he's joining us at the table...

Here he's just coloring with color pencils.  It's funny because while I'm reading along the story, he will repeat several things that I say.  He's really getting more out of it than I realized.  One afternoon he began to retell me part of the story that he'd heard read earlier in the week!  He's really paying attention!  Of course the color pencils and crayons don't usually last that long.  Thursday of this week I was going to give him play dough to play with, but it was dried up... so I googled how to make play dough, well I was missing an ingredient, so I began looking at other alternatives and came across how to make slime, or goo....  I had all the ingredients so I made slime for him......

This was a HIT for him, he spent more than an hour on it the first day, then again the next morning, and asked for it again that afternoon!  Now I know this will probably get old in a few days, but it's given us, around 2 hours of nice quiet school time while he plays!  I know I just need to keep new and different things in front of him to keep him busy.  Now in addition to coloring and making slime, we did work on the letter "A"this week. He traced and colored the letter everyday, we used flash cards, etc...  by Friday morning he was bringing me something and showing me the letter  "A"that he'd found on his own.  So we are just going to work on letter recognition and sounds this year, nothing real formal, just having fun!  He's enjoying school so far.

In the midst of school, Will has started playing football with a homeschool group out of Montgomery, our cover school.  Evangel Family Christian Academy.  He's loving the football, we are making about 2 trips a week for practice, we are carpooling with another family.  Here he is in his football uniform before going to practice...

We finished our week on Friday by celebrating with lunch at Golden Ranch!  After lunch we had to run a few errands, here's my 3 sweeties waiting in the van...









A great start so far.  Thanking God for his love and mercy!