our dozen beautiful feet

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 ...