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On Sunday evening, our church had a special 5th Sunday Sing! K sang, Daddy played the guitar, and T played the drums. When I asked L what she did she said, "I tapped my foot and clapped my hands." They did a song from Seeds Family Worship called "Cast Your Cares." The song (and all Seeds Family Worship music) is based on Scripture! This is a great resource for families to use during family worship times, music in the car, or to blast when you're working on household chores. We love Seeds Family Worship!
The children help out with weekly chores, and have them all memorized now. Monday is clean the bedrooms day. This is the day the bedrooms are all vacuumed and dusted. Tuesday is bathroom day, Wednesday is living room day, Thursday is kitchen and dining room day, and Friday is basement day.
The caterpillars have all formed their chrysalis' now, and we are anticipating some butterflies sometime next week! In science, we are also studying fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals using our Considering God's Creation curriculum.
Another new thing I started this year is each child has their own Language Arts notebook. In this notebook we are writing down all the different parts of speech, and doing our creative writings in this notebook. This book will be both a resource and a collection of their writing for this school year. This is K's notebook page. She wrote, " Every sentence begins with an uppercase letter and ends with punctuation." 
Tuesday is art day. Last year we always did art at the end of our day, and do you know what that means? Art usually was left undone and this made K very sad. So this year I have promised her we will always start with art on Tuesdays. This week our lesson was about color and how color is used to communicate something. We are still working our way through our Artistic Pursuits book. Have you ever tried watercolor crayons? We love them! They are so much fun! 
Both T and K are working on cursive. K is much more interested than T, because she wants to write pretty. T thinks being able to print and type should be enough, but I explained to him that he at least needs to be able to read cursive writing, and he agreed. So we will continue our short cursive lessons with him. 
I discovered stickers are a great blessing of encouragement for my children in their school work! I don't really "get" this, but stickers are cheap and if it blesses and encourages them I will give them a sticker for hard work and happy hearts!
For more weekly wrap-ups, head over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and get some inspiration from other home educating families!
2 comments:
Fortunately for T, there are other and quicker ways to learn to read cursive than through learning to write it.
Learning to write cursive takes months or a year (sometimes longer, as you know -- learning to read cursive takes a half-hour to an hour if it's done through demonstrating to the student how every cursive letter evolved -- or devolved -- step-by-step from an originally simpler and more recognizable version of the letter. (I've taught five- and six-year-olds to read cursive this way, if they could read at all, so that they could read what the grown-ups and big kids were writing: the five- and six-year-olds were able to acquire this skill quickly without writing cursive themselves.)
In any case, you and T (and K too, of course) ought to know about the the research showing that the fastest and clearest handwriters avoid cursive. (For citation and summary: visit http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com/WritingRebels.html .)
The highest-speed highest-legibility handwriters join some, not all, of the letters -- making the easiest joins, skipping the rest -- and tend to use print-like shapes of those letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree. The web-site below (in my sign-off) includes tips and resources for teaching such a high-efficiency, accident-resistant handwriting.
Kate Gladstone
Director, the World Handwriting Contest
Founder and CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Looks like ya'll had a good week! My daughter learned to write in cursive, but she prints everything now. My son is learning cursive because some people say it is good for dyslexic kids. In any case, my husband and I both print everything - and I printed while taking notes all the way through college and medical school. We use Getty-Dubay handwriting which we found to be the easiest and most intuitive writing curriculum.
My kids have been doing chores since they were little, but somehow they still manage to "forget" to do them sometimes! Ah, well, they are important skills to learn, so it's good that you're teaching them now. My kids started doing their own laundry when they were 10 and 13.
Have a great week!
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