Homeschool Update



Emperor's new 3D chess set



Here's a little snapshot of what Emperor's been up to so far this school year.  See the sidebar for links to many of the resources discussed in this post.

English/Grammar and Reading:

Completed much of Bob Jones Reading 5 book (he's done; I made him skip some plays and whatnot).  He has finished about a third of ABeka's Of America 1 book and is working on Bob Jones Reading 6, As Full as the World.  I like ABeka and Bob Jones books very much for younger children, but after this year we will move to novel studies as I think older children need to study an entire work at a time rather than an anthology of short stories and excerpts of longer works.  Personal preference.

Emperor has also completed the Reading Detective A1 workbook this school year.

He does a little writing each week or so, and we polish his drafts together. He also has completed the Latin Word Roots vocabulary book. We've worked in his English book as well. Emperor needs to learn to complete these assignments on his own and also to take his writing seriously. He absolutely hates it. I'm not sure what our local school district might be able to offer that is any better, but we're looking into it. Don't know.

Science:

Emperor is nearly finished with ABeka fourth grade science.  He has only to complete a study on the solar system before finishing with his science requirement for the entire school year.  Hardly surprising, as we are finished with 700 of our 1000 required hours and have been working since July 1. 

He also loves working with his snap circuit kit and observing birds.  He will continue with those activities and we'll find other things for him to do as well before next school year rolls around.

Mathematics:

Emperor is now done with a little less than half of Teaching Textbooks Algebra I.  For some reason algebra is just a slower go than previous math courses, and it takes time to study and understand the concepts.

History:

Emperor's artwork.

We've finished The Story of the World: Ancient Times and have moved on to volume 2 in the series dealing with the Middle Ages.  I've ordered the rest of the entire set; this is one of those series you will come back to and reread/redo later as well.  I also have a lot of material on Ancient Rome and we'll cover that as well.  There is no way it can all be done in one year!  We're just going to keep going and having fun.

Chess:

Two hours' of study per day.  Tournaments.  A lot of hard work and dedication to the game. :)

Art:

Much of what we do in art is from the Story of the World activity book.  Recently we made a Viking ship of paper and Emperor plans to do a Beowulf movie on youtube.  He's also finished a book on Medieval times and I've included a picture with this blog post.

Latin:

We've completed Prima Latina!