Well, everyone is still in an art phase, which for the past week has been drawing comic strips. Many books on cartooning and animation have been borrowed from the library and read, mostly by Micah. Hopefully, soon I'll be able to share examples of their work. Micah has developed at least two comic strips with different characters. One is called Squiggles; it features a scraggly cat whose owner is an overdoting grandma. The other is a boy and his dog( reminds me a little of Calvin and Hobbs). Jacob's strip is called "Dan". He can also draw Charlie Brown exactly like the comic strip. This has boosted his confidence, as he is usually in big brother's shadows. He now knows he has talent and can come up with good ideas too.
The boys have read several articles out of a kids History magazine about polar exploration( that I conveniently placed in the bathroom.
Jacob seems to have left his war stage for now, which I am glad of. We felt he was beginning to be a little off balance with too much violent topics.
They are all still reading independantly a lot and not just comics. We are still on Amy Carmichael, but Micah, James and I are reading another missionary book as well.
Hannah is initiating reading more and more on her own and has gone through several lower level readers, including finishing a large reader book that we had previously been working on. She and I have baked a few things lately and I have her read the instructions and ingredients and find the right utensils. Of course , we doubled the recipee, so we worked on adding, multiplying and dividing fractions. When the dozen cookies came out, I inroduced her to multiplication by showing her the four rows of three and vice versa. she quickly ( and excitedly) found other math problems, like 6 two times.
Jacob, Nathan , Hannah and I have also played some dominoes, and I make them add up all their own points.
We started a point system for chores, which has all of them adding and subtracting as well.
Nathan and Jacob has used the usborn pallette and cards for math this past week.
A lot of time lately has been spent clearing our clutter from the house and our rooms,and extra clothes. Everyone has their personal posessions down to one bag and one suitcase for clothes. It has been freeing for everyone. Each person independantly began getting rid of their stuff( got tired finally of having to clean it all the time!) I was surprised a little but very pleased to see their ability to let go of things asnd their generosity towards others with it.
All in all, I feel they are learning a lot, even if it isn't all academics per se. We are also enjoying Dad being home on leave for a couple of weeks.
We realize the need to downsize again, but what to do away with now? How did you do it this time? What made the cut to stay / go? How is life with Rachel married? What's new? I miss you!
ReplyDeleteHi and I wanted to answer the inquiry about the cut. We cut out any entertainment movies and kept only those which were Christian. That can be a loose term and so we applied a strict standard. I think we have about ten movies left. All that we have educationally was removed if it contained any "poop," in other words, secularism, evolution, psychology, etc. Under this, I even got rid of a nice encyclopidia set I had. We also cleaned out the music unless it was overtly Christian. We may have kept a few classical favorites but were pretty strict about that too. We also applied a "mobile and portable" standard of items. The house we live in is completely furnished all ready and so we currently don't own any major furniture other than a kitchen table set. We have all of our clothes and personal items down to each person having one carry on and two "stow away" pieces of luggage. Whatever kitchen items and small appliances we have are just about all 220 volt for Europe and so we'll leave them here. We are contiuing to make efforts at having hand-powered items whenever possible such as egg beaters, grinders, etc. We still have a bit more cleaning out to do but I'd say we are just about done. We still have quite a bit in our school room but we cut that down by at least half.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you guys have really done a terrific job. We need to do that again. We did our movies and such several times already, they are fairly easy to downsize. It's the rest of the house that needs work. Of course, any big furniture we have we would leave behind, along with a lot of our kitchen stuff. Our goal is everything will fit in the bed of the truck by the time we move again.
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