Bible

Through the end of November, we continued to read God's Names and recite our Monthly Memory Verses.

Copywork

Every morning while I am reading to Sarge before he has his Independent Playtime in his bedroom, the girls do their Copywork. Right now, this basically looks like handwriting. They work on one letter per week from A Reason for Handwriting K. I put the page in a reusable dry erase pocket so they can practice writing the letter every morning. Then on Friday they take the lesson out of the dry erase pocket and write their very best on the paper. Little Bug also writes 1 Bible verse per day. She is tracing over my writing by writing on a dry erase pocket. If they are finished with their Copywork before I am finished reading with Sarge, they are to get a book and read while they wait for me. (No pictures but I will try and write a post about this including pictures because it is working very well for us!)

Language Arts

We are enjoying All About Spelling Level 1! Sweet Pea likes to join in on the lessons and since the words are basically CVC words, it is perfect for where she is right now in learning to read. Little Bug is also continuing to work through AAR. We do 2 days of AAR and 2 days of AAS weekly. It won't be long before Little Bug completes AAR Level 2. Sweet Pea continues to work through Confessions of a Homeschooler's Kinder curriculum and Little Bug continues to have her nose in a book very often most days!

Math

Little Bug is already over halfway finished with the first book of Horizons 1. We just continue to plug along with lots of review and practice of the basic math facts so she has a solid foundation of basic math concepts. We do the Saxon 1 Timed Tests over and over again. Sweet Pea finished BJU K5 and we are now working in Hands On Thinking Skills! Confessions of a Homeschooler curriculum includes fun math games and activities too. We've been working on counting to 100 and skip counting.

Classical Conversations

Mid-November we completed Week 12 of Cycle 2! We are now on Christmas break and will go back to CC in January. I love this break. It is nice to have time to review the first 12 weeks before moving on to the next 12 weeks. The last 6 weeks of science we learned about the Solar System! I couldn't wait to teach the phases of the moon with Oreos! That was lots of fun! The girls also kept a "Moon Journal" where they recorded what phase the moon was in each night. Sarge still asks to go outside and see the moon nearly every night!

Thanksgiving

I have mentioned before that I love the flexibility year round schooling affords us. We hit a lull right before Thanksgiving and I knew we all needed a break so...we took a week long break at Thanksgiving! It was so refreshing and just what we all needed. That week we did fun, effortless-on-my-part Thanksgiving activities and read lots of our favorite Thanksgiving books while talking about the first Thanksgiving long ago.

Another reason I decided to take a week off at Thanksgiving was because I needed time to organize the dining/homeschool room! The last week of November we put this new set up to the test and it was absolutely marvelous!

Field Trips and Special Outings

We enjoyed a couple field trips during the month of November: the zoo with our CC community and a family bowling night!

We also went to a Gingerbread House Workshop with our CC community!

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we went to pick out our Christmas Tree!

Now it is December and Christmas is fast approaching! We will continue on with school and I will evaluate closer to Christmas whether we will need some more time off or if we can keep going through December!

This was a VERY fast 1st semester to the 2016-2017 school year!

- Elaine