Starting a New Term

This week is our first week of Term 4! Which means our school year is getting closer to done! (Shh! Don't tell my kids we have a summer term for 3 weeks in June!)

Summer dreaming of swimming in the lake (hopefully sliding in)!

Last week we tried something new and did end of term examinations via Charlotte Mason style. Most of my research came from this post on the 4Real message board. The boys did about what I expected (perhaps a little better). I learned that we need to spend more time on spelling and Tyler didn't understand anything he read from his science book from the third term. This was a springboard on changes to make for term 4.

I like to keep things fresh and new and we make changes every term to keep our school going in that direction. Here are some new things we are doing for term 4.

I'm bringing the boys together in science and we are doing a bird study. We are using What's That Bird?, but I didn't get the Memoria Press books. We also have Birds in Missouri for our reference. The Happy Scientist has some videos to watch too. I have the Burgess Bird Book on hand, but we may listen to some of it on LibriVox.

Caleb is feeling accomplished by finishing his math book and is eagerly starting the next one, Math-U-See Zeta.

For religion we are reading from a few new books, St. Patrick's Summer by Marigold Hunt and More Catholic Tales for Boys and Girls by Caryll Houselander. I'll be reading these books out loud to both boys. Tyler will be reading My Path to Heaven: A Young Person's Guide to the Faith on his own (hopefully).

During morning baskets we started two new books. Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome and Canadian Summer by Hilda van Stockum. We are listening to the Swallowdale on CD because the book is very long and the language doesn't come naturally to me when reading out loud. The lady on the recording does a much better job! The boys loved the first Mitchell book so buying all three in that series was a good call last summer!

Caleb started a new grammar program from IEW, Fit-it!,  a few weeks ago. Of course, they updated the program and it is all new two weeks after I purchase it. (I feel slightly cheated!) The version I have was cheaper though. Caleb is working on Tom Sawyer, which isn't even an option anymore. I think that is good, because learning grammar from Tom Sawyer is just . . . . not right!  ; ) It is going well and I plan to start Tyler on it next year or during the summer term. I wanted to give Caleb (the oldest) a head start in the program.

Tyler enjoys doing art and he hadn't done much this year. I got Meet the Masters for him. We have started it, but not far enough for any reviews. I thought it would be a way to get in some art appreciation and art projects at the same time. Homeschool Co-Op had Meet the Masters as one of their deals last month.

Our focus this term is to keep chipping away at IEW Student Writing Intensive with Caleb. Caleb is also steadily working on his math. Tyler's copywork and math is his focus. 

Tyler's Lego creation of a construction site.

Since it went well (low amount of complaining from the test takers) I'm planning on doing end-of-term examination again during our last week (mid May).

We will be continuing on with everything else. You can read my past posts on the books we are using this year here.