Our First Week Of School Is Coming To A Close

Oak and I had a fabulous first week of school. Oak did find waking up earlier a bit hard. Normally we are year-round homeschoolers but we decided to take the summer off. He ended up getting into a pattern of waking up closer to 9:00 each morning. We both seem to have gotten back into the normal school routine pretty quickly though.

This week I had him ease into his lessons. I had him doing science, history, literature, and math. Next week I will add in Language Lessons, vocabulary, copywork, spelling, and geography. I think this helped with the transition.

He is LOVING...and I am too...his science. We are doing Summer By the Sea in The Discovering Nature and Science Series by Queen homeschool supplies. I must admit I was not really looking forward to biology, or any high school science curricula for that matter. Science seemed dry when I went to school (public school) and most high school science curricula for homeschoolers seem very dry (in my opinion). I wanted something that kept his thirst of knowledge alive. Summer By the Sea along with wonderful whole books will do just that.

My dry science texts made me not enjoy science (made me not like history either). I so wished I had been homeschooled and used a Charlotte Mason approach. This is a whole other matter though, moving forward.

In Summer By the Sea you follow a story about siblings who travel to visit family in New England. Every week you read a chapter of the story and then the rest of the week is followed by activities. The activities include; research, art, writing, experiments, etc.

I am a fan of his history, he is not. We are doing The Story of the Ancients in the A Living History of Our World by Queen Homeschool Supply. We are Christian but he is feeling overwhelmed by the biblical history and prefers to have less or a secular history curriculum. We both have decided to use this for bible. We both really do not want to drop it. A Living History of Our World is well written and follows the style of  The Discovering Nature and Science Series. A Living History of Our World differs in that it includes activities for elementary age up through high school.

We will be using whole books for his history instead. We will use some as read-alouds and some as readers. We will read books from Yesterday's Classics, Genevieve Foster, Beautiful Feet Books, G.A. Henty, among many others.

We are both really enjoying his math. He is doing Life of Fred Pre-Algebra with Biology. I read the introduction with him and we both found ourselves chuckling. I love a math curriculum that keeps learning fun. This not only keeps the learning fun but Oak finds himself wanting to do more math each day. I plan to read through this book and work the math problems myself.

I am so grateful for the enjoyable first week. I hope each week is as enjoyable.