Learning About Early Explorers

I generally share bits and pieces about what we’re doing in our school week, but every now and then I am hoping to pull all of the kids together in one post and sum-up what we are doing ~ and participate with Kris in the Weekly Wrap-Up. For our first week I had intended on starting off slow and over the next few weeks adding more as we go along.

Turns out the only thing we didn’t have in our day was Spanish. Way to start off slow, eh?

We’re getting back into a semi-routine and still working out a few kinks, but overall the kids are doing great ~ and starting off the new year with a bang. This year we added a few new texts to our studies and we are loving them!!! Here’s a quick sum-up of our week.

History ~ We’re going to be mixing the literature part of Beautiful Feet along with the Time Traveler Units from Homeschool in the Woods. Can I just say I LOVE the New World Explorers unit that we are doing? The kids are really enjoying the hands-on activities that we do almost every day.

This week we talked about explorers {what they are and reasons for exploring}, the life of an explorer {jobs of a sailor, flags, maps} and parts of a ship. We learned how to tie knots…

and completed some interactive notebooking pages on the parts of a ship.

Science ~ Our first week using Nancy Larson Science 1 and it has been great timing since we’re talking about the stages of life and have a new little nephew to observe and talk about while we’re learning! I am so excited to use this science program this year!

Sunday I’ll be posting about our latest science experiment too as a part of Science Sunday, so stay tuned for that. :)

Spelling ~ The girls are reviewing some of the lessons in Level 3 of All About Spelling {and I’m so glad to see that they are remembering more than I thought!!}. Zachary is also reviewing a few lessons in Level 1 and doing great!

Reading ~ I have been beyond amazed at Zachary’s reading this past week. We picked up our Cobweb the Cat reader and he has been reading so well. Considering he hasn’t been reading to me all summer, I was really worried that we would have some major catching up to do. He has been so proud of himself!

Language/Writing ~ We started right back in with First Language Lessons and the Complete Writer. So far, so good! Zachary isn’t necessarily enjoying the step-up in needing to write more…but he’ll get there. :)

Preschool ~ If you’d like to see what we did for preschool this week with Kaleb, you can visit my Preschool Corner post that went up a little earlier today.

That’s it for this week! I generally share bits and pieces about what we’re doing in our school week, but every now and then I am hoping to pull all of the kids together in one post and sum-up what we are doing ~ and participate with Kris in the Weekly Wrap-Up. Be sure to head over and see what other families did this week.