Hydrangeas and Harmony: School Summary - Samuel Morse, The Alamo, New Zealand, and the CA Gold Rush

A Summary of April 13-24

We came back full throttle after our intense, week-long field trip to Philly and Massachusetts. The end of the year is in sight, and I've been pushing the younglings to double-up so we can finish sooner. It seems like they're doing lots of work but nothing's getting done.

Here's what we did:

Things that were scheduled:

Math

Language Arts (Grammar, Reading, and Writing; Spelling for Soprano)

Electives:

Typing, Greek (Tenor), Spanish (Tenor), Home Ec (Soprano)

Soprano finished her Home Ec. book and is quite glad that we won't be using the third volume in the series next year. We'll be focusing on sewing instead.

My Father's World Exploration to 1850

While we still have four more weeks of MFW left, these are the last two that have history, state and president study, art, music, and read alouds scheduled. The next four weeks will focus on Bible, our hymn study, and doing state reports.

Bible: This year we're doing an in-depth study of the book of James and attempting to memorize the entire book. We've now learned all of chapters 1-4 and up to chapter 5, verse 8.

Science: Done, done, done! I added in a couple lessons from AIG's Inventions book (L2 the telephone, Samuel Morse, and L24 ) because they fit with our history reading.

History:

We read about China and the ongoing Opium War, then about Samuel Morse and his invention of the telegraph. The younglings wrote their names out in Morse Code and then practiced tapping it out on their desks. We read about the Alamo, how the British settled New Zealand, and the California Gold Rush. I bought a gold panning kit for them to do but we haven't gotten around to using it yet.

We continued our state and president study.

I added in some map work from SOTW (Mexico, the Repulic of Texas, and the U.S.; Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand) and MapTrek (Gold Rush in CA). No extra timeline pieces though.

I've found that it works well for me to read the chapter in Story of the World while having them do the map work from the SOTW Activity Book. It takes some thinking on my part to read a portion, jump to the activity book, and then back to the text but I think it helps them cement where things are happening in the text.

Other MFW:

Music: We read about the Romantic Era of music in Meet the Great Composers and Young Scholar's Guide to Music. For our hymn study, we learned "The Solid Rock".

Art: We learned about landscape art and tints, shades, and half-tones.