The Weekly Wrapup - Week 1

 It's the start of another school year.. New house, new grade.. but nothing else has really changed to be honest.

 

  They still wear the same clothes each day until I tell them they gotta go change, Garrett still hates writing..  Ashleigh still hates math.. and there's still a bunny trying to get attention during class time.  Go figure!!

When we moved into this new house (actually, even before - when I saw the inside pictures while we were in the process of accepting the house), I was pretty thrilled about having the island in the dining room.  I pictured it as the perfect place for them to sit and do their classwork..  Yeah, that didn't happen.  Instead, they like to sit on the plush rug on the floor to do most of their work, with the exception of the work they have to do on the computer, like their math assignments. 

Examining a crosscut sample of a plant stem of a vascular plant

For their 8th grade year, our class work will be:

English:  IEW Fix it Grammar (Robin Hood followed by Frog Prince, or Just Deserts), IEW Poetry Memorization, IEW Following Narnia Vol 1: The Lions Song (writing lessons in Structure and Style), and The Critical Thinking Company - Vocabulary Virtuoso

Math:  Teaching Textbooks as well as various math assignments from books from Math Essentials

History:  US History using My Father's World Exploration to 1850

Science:  Apologia Botany and Young Scientist Biology from Greg Landry's Homeschool Science

Extras :  Memoria Press Latina Christiana, Bible Study, and music lessons (Garrett: Violin and Ashleigh: Piano)

Garrett working on a lesson from Greg Landry's Homeschool Science

Our first week went pretty well, or as well as to be expected, considering they had most of the summer off. Ashleigh has been fighting with her allergies this week - we have had tons of rain (it's rained just about every day since we moved here - and it's a desert!!!) and that's caused a lot of plants to really go overboard with their pollen production.  For the first few days, she was completely miserable but we got her a refill on her allergy medication and she's been good to go the rest of the week.  Garrett wasn't to thrilled to hear that he would be doing more writing this year, but as we ease him into things, I think he'll be okay.

Ashleigh dealing with her allergies for the first week of school

For their first week, they have been learning about early explorers of the New World - Leif Erikson, Christopher Columbus, and John Cabbot as well as the counties involved in their exploration.   For English, they had to write their first paper - a short paragraph about Sherlock Holmes, while in Science, they had a review about taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, then learned the difference between vascular and non vascular plants and angiosperms vs gymnosperms.  We spent this week reviewing their previous Latin knowledge that they had studied before the summer just as a refresher before we start adding new material.  We will start actual lessons for Latin next week. 

Both kids began lessons with Practice Monkeys (review will be coming soon) for their instruments this week.  For this week, we just used pre-recorded lessons but they both have an assessment with the instructor tomorrow to make sure they are placed in the proper class for their live lessons.  Both are needing to pick out a "fun song" to work on while they are working on their lesson material.  Ashleigh hasn't picked anything out but Garrett finally decided on the song "Nothing Else Matters".. Probably a bit more advanced then what was necessary, but that's what he wanted, so have at it kid.. lol