our dozen beautiful feet

I have SO been looking forward to this week!  We took a two-week break from American history to focus on what was going on across the pond in Victorian England!  We spent a lot of time this week reading "In the Days of Queen Victoria."  It was so interesting to me to read about her childhood and how she became queen of England at 18 years of age.  She was a fascinating person and queen!  I have also always loved the time period of her reign.  We really enjoyed reading about the lives of servants, commoners, and the aristocracy during this time period.  In Week 14, we focused mostly on the founding of Australia, and about the unique flora, fauna, and animals of Australia.  Of course, we're also keeping on with math, science, Veritas Bible, and All About Spelling! The kids read this on their own this week. We are working toward more independent work this year, and it's going well! Luke's notebook page for the week.  He called this, ...

These last two weeks have been a lot of fun!  We dove into history with stories of Davy Crockett, the Alamo, Cherokee Indians, and more.  We learned about Andrew Jackson, who was the first President from outside the aristocracy, born in a log cabin.  I have always loved Tapestry's book choices, but I am just not in love with The Story of the World.  The stories are fine, but I've often gotten bored with them.  They also are very clearly written from a secular world view, which is fine, but it's very obvious.  Because I've really been enjoying reading about Charlotte Mason method, and looking at ideas on Ambleside Online and Simply Charlotte Mason , I've gotten a lot of ideas about alternative books for our history readings.  These two weeks, we have read stories from This Country of Ours and Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans, both online free at www.mainlesson.com .  There are hundreds of fantastic books online free there.  I ...

We are getting back into the swing of things here at Preedy Academy!  This week, we began a new unit in our third year of Tapestry.  I just love the Tapestry books!  This unit, we are covering 1825 to 1850.  We began our studies with a look at the Presidency of John Quincy Adams, the last of the aristocratic presidents.  We also studied DeWitt Clinton, Governor of New York and his dream of seeing the Erie Canal come to be! I didn't really know anything about the Erie Canal, but we went through a great book by Cheryl Harness that was very well-illustrated and engaging.  It had a song in the back cover that we also really enjoyed learning about the building of the Erie Canal. This unit, I'm moving more of our work out of a notebook and into a copybook.  The kids have had copybooks for a couple of years now.  But I've just used it literally to copy things into, quotes, Bible verses from time to time. It hasn't been very useful.  So this ...

Howdy!!  I'm blogging two weeks together, because we did a bit of traveling in between, and have three weeks where we did two weeks of school.   I love the Classical Conversations Trivium Tables. Luke is doing Table 2 and Kiryn is doing Table 1.  She likes to leave me little notes instead of doing her work.   In Artistic Pursuits we did gold (silver) leaf art.  Below, Luke imitated the decorations around the piano. He did a great job! This week, we learned about bases and acids with our indicator, cabbage juice.  It sure was stinky, but they loved this experiment! We continued with our study of South America these last two weeks and really enjoyed studying the geography more in-depthly.   And, just for some fun, here are some funny art that was produced this week. This was in Meryn's school book.  Only in India do they draw cars with black smoke coming out the back. Ha! This masterpiece ...

Week 7! Hard to believe we are already almost finished with the first nine weeks of this year! We did a really fun science experiment this week!  The kids asked to do it again and again!  They learned that the presence of calcium in hard water means water doesn't bubble up with soap as much as regular water. Chemistry is fun! I love how Elemental Science requires the kids to draw pictures and make observations and conclusions in their notebooks for each experiment!   This week we began a three week study on the formation of South America and Simon Bolivar, the Libertador!  I had never studied his life before, so I learned a ton about the history of South America and how it was influenced by what was going on in Europe and North America.  We loved the title "South America: The Continent and its Countries."  It was published by Tapestry of Grace I think, specifically for this year.  It was the perfect combination of fun activities and info...

Happy birthday to me!  Monday was my 35th birthday.  Dad celebrated in style by taking us for a night away to the Marriott! It's always been a dream of mine to go to the Marriott for a night, ever since it opened a couple of years ago in our city.  We got to eat two meals in a row there, dinner buffet and breakfast buffet.  We swam in their gorgeous pool twice, and all enjoyed the luxurious bath tub and room. Truly relaxing and we so enjoyed ourselves! So, that started our week off strangely.  We missed our learning work entirely on Monday, because we were busy soaking up all the Marriott we could. : ) We tried to get the all of our work done in the rest of the four days!  This week, we studied the life of James Madison, and his wife, Dolley.  She was known as the host-est with the most-est at the White House.  She was technically the first First Lady to live there.  John and Abigail Adams moved in just before his term ended, while it wa...

The last couple of weeks, I've been reading more about Charlotte Mason method of homeschooling.  I've read a few books about it before, but I got onto the Ambleside Online website this week to figure it out a bit more.  Even though I'm happy with what we're doing, I just always really like to evaluate other curriculums and glean the best stuff from them to implement in what we are doing.  I loved a lot of what I saw on Ambleside Online!   The entire curriculum is free online. You can access the schedules and titles, and many of the literature selections have links to free Kindle or audio versions here .  I ended up downloading about 40 books from the Years 2 and 3 list to my Kindle... for FREE!  We have been enjoying the Burgess Book of Animals, and This Country of Ours since then.   Charlotte Mason is not technically a classical education. But there are many elements that overlap.  A chronological study of history paired with historica...