A New School Year!

We're back at it!  Another year of fun and family and learning . . . Smiley is a First Grader and Caleb is in the Third Grade.  We started school officially at the beginning of August.  We like to mix in time for visiting relatives and working on the farm, so we start school a bit earlier than usual.  Here's a bit of the fun and learning that we've been doing during our first month of homeschooling on Mountain Moon Farm:

Smiley's math so far has covered place value (reading numbers into the hundreds), a refresher on writing numbers to 20, and using math blocks to prepare for addition.  

 Math is Caleb's favorite subject and he was excited to start exercises in early multiplication.

Language Arts has Caleb reading the classic Winnie the Pooh stories by A.A. Milne and Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling.  Below are his paragraphs and illustrations about his reading.  (Remember to click on a photo to enlarge.)  Caleb is also learning cursive and practices spelling words each week.

Smiley is practicing each uppercase and lowercase letter of the alphabet while illustrating the fairy tales we read together (the letters are usually in the shape of the characters; he's done A - E so far).  He is also working in a handwriting book.

Social Studies has Caleb learning about the ancient Hebrews and Smiley is making his own calendar.  On Smiley's calendar he sees the transitions of days, week, months, in addition to illustrating the cycle of the moon.

For Science, Caleb is learning about the moon and sun and how they relate to the earth.  Hands on projects, and discussions are illustrated in his science notebook, in addition to the independent reading Caleb does from library books.

Smiley has been collecting leaves and flowers on our nature walks which we press and add to his science notebook, after learning how to identify and use them (he pasted and colored on the pages; I write the plant name cards).  In observing the seasons, Smiley illustrated a tree and how it will look different from summer to fall.

Caleb is able to do much more work independently this year, as a third grader, and I write out a list for him each week so he knows what will need to be completed.  Here is an example of Caleb's weekly list:

This month we have also take time for Smiley's violin lessons, camping at the beach, reading for fun, collecting moths and caterpillars, and whatever else we can find to do outside.  On our very first day of school in August, we had a calf born.  Dave kept interrupting our science lesson, where I was fastidiously acting out the earth's orbit of the sun, to update us on the mama cow in labor.  I finally realized that the kids experiencing a real live birth was probably more valuable than my own science lecture, so we spent the afternoon sitting in the field with the mama cow and her new baby.  Next week the boys start their classes at Riverwood Community School which will help round out their academics with art, foreign language, and outdoor science.  We are off to a good start and looking forward to another year of homeschool fun!