Let's Try This Again

Well, now it's been almost a year since my last post. Sigh. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this, but I'm going to try this one more time.

We've now finished the house we were building and have moved in AND we LOVE it!!! We have about 6 acres and we are really enjoying the peace and quiet here. We got way off track with our school work during the move, but we're now getting back on the right track and we're really enjoying what we're doing this year. We've had several math issues, particularly with facts, so I've decided to supplement with Mastering Mathematics. That's going well. We've also taken several detours in our language arts program this year, but are settling into just some basics with Rod & Staff. In the next few weeks, I'm going to be following the suggestions and ideas presented in The Writer's Jungle and maybe even using one of the Arrow studies from the BraveWriter website. We need to start making writing a part of every day now that the cursive writing is coming along.

The star of the year though has been Sonlight! We are loving it!!! Right now, we are reading Little Britches by Ralph Moody as our read aloud and the kids always beg for more. They are reading a Landmark biography of the Wright Brothers for their independent reader. They are also loving that, too. It has inspired them to pull out the Legos and build planes. For history, we're getting ready to head into learning about World War I. We're using Sonlight for this so we'll be reading from the Landmark History of the American People and Usborne's The World Wars. We'll also be using the Story of the USA workbooks. In science, we just finished reading a biography of Rachel Carson and it was such a great way to get them thinking about nature and living things all around them. We're focusing on biology this year and are getting ready to start a Corn & Beans TOPS unit that should be lots of fun. All in all, we have just really loved Sonlight.

For pleasure, we are reading Boomtown by Nowen N. Particular. It is a funny book, full of silly but clever wit that is entertaining for all of us. We found it through a recommendation of a friend and are only a few chapters into it. I'm hoping it holds up all the way to the end!

I'm planning a trip to IKEA later this week to get more Billy bookcases. We have a wall of 7 of them, but it's nowhere near enough for our land of story books. We've got boxes and boxes that were in storage during our year of building the house and I'm ready to pull them out and see what adventures are in store for us. Reading levels have grown and the little ones are ready for lots of the chapter books that have been packed away. It's so wonderful and such a blessing to have our big new school room to hold all these great books!

If I could figure out how to post pictures, I'd do that. Maybe I'll ask my sweet husband for help. Or, maybe we'll just read instead!