Welcome to our table!
For the second time this year, someone finished all of the week?s work by Friday noon! I am thrilled, and so was Miss 10.
Miss 13 studied Key To Algebra, Booklet 5 and wrote the test, all in one week!
Miss 8 has started reading; in fact, she has even made a reading list for herself, just like the older children do. She?s really enjoying the Littles books by John Peterson, and the Moody books by Sarah Maxwell.
We all savored the DVD Chateaux de Loire: Le val des rois by Pierre Brouwers. Even though it?s in French and no one here understood it all, the music, subject matter, and photography are so good that I?m watching it for the third time! I highly recommend it with the caution that about four of the art scenes briefly show nudes. We?re ordering Brouwers? DVD?s about London and Scotland from the library; it?s a good way to combine French, geography, and history with pure enjoyment.
Other than that, everyone plugged along steadily in each subject, writing, calculating, reading, drawing, and struggling to understand.
I?ve finally got my foreign language course descriptions and course contents (for French, Dutch, and Greek) under control for Miss 18?s university applications. Next week, I hope to have all the maths and sciences finished, and get most of the history and geography wrapped up as well. All of this is largely finished, but a few big decisions still have to be made. Sometimes I don?t know under what course title to put various large projects or how to assign marks….
For example, what percentage of a French course mark is an independently organized trip to Paris worth, considering that my daughter?s friend spoke no French and my daughter had to make all the arrangements, translate, and have enough confidence in her language skills to make decisions? I thought 30% was reasonable, but my husband raised his eyebrows at that. On the other hand, he thought daily work should be worth well over 10% of the entire course.
To see what other homeschooling families have been up to, please visit Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.
Love the playhouse pictures! I love watching my children play and seeing what they create.
Visiting from weekly wrap-up 🙂
Thanks for your encouraging blog comment.
If you were willing, I’d appreciate a blog post or a comment on my blog sometime about foreign language learning. I feel like this is an area I DO NOT have a handle on! You speak at least one other language, right? Seems like it would be easier to teach a language if you actually know the language. I speak some Spanish but not a lot, and while I have a Spanish curriculum I like for kids (La Clase Divertida), the children are not so enamoured and I haven’t had them watch it since the baby was born. Need to get back on track there!
Do you like Rosetta Stone a lot? Does it really work? It sounds appealing but it is expensive…I’d hate to buy it and then not use it. That’s assuming you have used RS. I have some vague memory that you have but maybe I’m wrong.
Thanks, Laraba
OK, Laraba, I’ll do that, but probably not this week.
Our approach is fairly low-stress and seems to work quite well. Of course, it helps that I speak Dutch, and that I studied French in highschool but I relearned most of my French by teaching the kids.
Last year I wrote a post about how we learn Dutch: http://homeschoolblogger.com/reviewsandmore/2010/09/how-we-study-dutch/
We use a different method for French because I’m not fluent in it. And I bought a self-teaching course for Greek.
Annie Kate
[…] favorite thing this week was… when the Little Misses decided they needed a thief for their playhouse. They didn’t want to use any of their beloved people, so they decided to cut them out of […]