2010-2011 School Year

We are finishing our 17th week of our school year this week, and I thought I would give an update as to how our year is progressing.

Our curriculum started us out in the late 1800's, and we are now just finishing up with WWII.

Kylee finished reading "Lord of the Flies" yesterday, and only cried twice :) She is also working on finishing a WWII poster on some of the highlights of the war. She has been writing mini-reports each week on different aspects of the war.

Faith is reading "The Chosen" by Chaim Potok. In one week she will have her 9-week comprehensive final. This year I started giving Faith weekly tests as well as these 9-week comprehensive tests in history and literature. She has always taken math tests and science tests but these history and literature tests are her first experience with timed short answer/essay type tests. She has done really well on them, and is learning some valuable test taking skills. On the writing front, she is in the final stages of writing a 10 page research paper on Women's roles during WWII.

Seth is currently reading "Pipi Longstocking". He wasn't so sure about it when he first saw it, but he is great about not judging a book by it's cover and has enjoyed reading it. He has also been working on writing a 6 page biography of Stalin. And this week is working on campaign posters for Truman and Dewey.

Joshi is reading "Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot" a book about the pilots who dropped supplies from the skies during the year after WWII, when Stalin set up blockades of all roads, railroads, and canal routes going in and out of West Berlin. This is a true story of a pilot who would drop candy for the children. He has been working on an "inventions of the 20th century" project for the last eight weeks, and is almost done. His writing assignments have been focusing on writing compare and contrast papers.

We have also just started going through a bible study about the mind of Christ. Ideally, we are going to learn to think more like Christ. The author of the study states that there are 6 attributes that characterize the mind of Christ, and help you to develop these traits. There are weekly memory verses, this week's is Roman 12:2, and a unit memory verse which is Philippians 2:5-11. The kids are great at memorizing these verses, I am the one who struggles with memorization. It is actually an adult bible study, but the kids are doing great! It is covering some great stuff, like purity and humbleness.

The boys are doing Apologia astronomy, Kylee is doing a general science course from Apologia and Faith is doing Apologia Biology.

Faith has also had U.S. Government and Philosophy as electives this year. It has been an interesting experience studying some of these philosophers from a christian perspective.

We have tried to introduce Spanish this year, but I haven't been very successful with that, may be time for a Spanish teacher :)

Overall it has been a great year so far!

Kristen