Tapestry of Grace: Year 2, Week 2

I entered this week with fear and trepidation, but also a determination to conquer being the homeschooling mommy of four kids.  It's on.

Each morning, we'd start as soon as Meryn went down for her nap, between 9 and 9:15.  Levi we'd keep occupied coloring, getting out toys, or as a last resort, a Baby Einstein.  (Only twice all week, I'm pretty proud of myself!)

During Meryn's naptime, we almost always could knock out our Bible, Grammar, Spelling, and either math or science. (We do math M-W-F, and science T-Th).  So then all that was left is our Tapestry work.  We'd either take a break, or they kept working on independent work, while I'd then entertain the littles from 11 or so until lunch.  Then lunch, littles back down for a nap, and around 2, we're hitting the books again.  Things went so well this week, that I actually managed to work out every afternoon (except Friday) either before or after our afternoon school time.  This week was a huge success in my opinion.  I CAN do it! : )

Here are some fun things we did this week!

Okay, so this was over the weekend, but a fun, child-initiated activity. : )

We painted the land onto our globes.  


We made some simple first mosaics, after the example of the Byzantine Empire. I'd like to do this again and again and work up to more complicated designs. 



After the early Christian church monks, we decorated the tops of paper, and Kiryn at least wrote a note to her Aunt Ashley congratulating her on the birth of her fifth baby, Lillian!


A "cartoon" rendition of the Fall and the Garden of Eden...



Pages from their science notebooks.  We're learning about earth and space...



I love this note booking thing. The things they come up with are hilarious.  


We read all about monks and nuns in monasteries and how they'd live off the land.  Kiryn copied this idea straight out of the book.  

I'm so proud of myself for making it through this week... not only surviving it, but enjoying it and having the energy to cook some good dinners too! All praise to God! 








Comments

  1. AnonymousJuly 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM

    Megan, thank you for posting! The more I see TOG and how you are able to use it with two of yours, I want to do it when Abigail is in 1st grade. I loved hearing the breakdown of your school day with the Littles naps.
    Love Christine

    ReplyDelete
  2. BrandyJuly 7, 2012 at 11:46 AM

    Megan...what a week! I'm gearing up to start in 2 weeks. I'm so nervous about what to do with Parks. Thankful for Wint's a.m. nap...but a toddler running around during school? Oh....we'll see how it goes. I'll be working it with you, friend!

    ReplyDelete
  3. BrandyJuly 7, 2012 at 11:47 AM

    Megan, what a week! Wow, girl! We're gearing up to start in 2 weeks and my biggest concern is my little toddler running around in the house during school. I'll be working it with you!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commonplace Essays with Writing & Rhetoric

It bears repeating.  The Writing & Rhetoric series by Classical Academic Press is really amazing.  My 5th and 6th graders are in Ch. 5 of the sixth book. They are learning to write commonplace essays, which are six paragraph essays refuting bad character traits.  They wrote their first essay this week.  We were behind schedule, and weren't going to finish for class. I was fine with that and wasn't rushing them, but they both wanted to finish their essays for class so badly they stayed up late Thursday night in order to finish it. This is their first attempt at a commonplace essay. I was SO pleased with the results. They had minimal help with these! :) (These were typed as they were written. Any mistakes are not typos, but the kids' grammar and spelling errors.) :) Against Boasters by Kiryn Preedy (10 years old) Boasters cover up weakness by puffing up their deeds and can cause real harm. When boasters exaggerate things they have done, they don’t kno...
Read more

The Trivium: Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric

Image
Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...
Read more

Picking Up Meryn!

Image
We made it to Ethiopia after a long day of travel!  We had a morning flight to Delhi, then a 15 hour layover, so we got to spend the day with some good friends in Delhi for the day.  We even got to sleep a few hours before going to the airport at midnight.  We had a very smooth process getting checked in and to our gate.  Kiryn was an amazing travel companion. I'm so thankful to have her with me. We left at 3 a.m. from Delhi, arrived a bit late in Addis, but had no line for a visa or immigration, got some money from the ATM, got our bags straight off the belt and found our driver outside.  Certainly, mercies from the Lord to make everything so easy. I'm not used to traveling alone... We got checked into the hotel, and hurriedly got a little unpacked, showered and changed, and I made all the 25 or so Thank You cards with tip gifts for the nannies to take to the care center. I got all of our gifts together for Meryn's nanny, Aynalem.  As soon as we went ...
Read more