Creation to the Greeks 2019-2020

Much that I really wanted to keep up with the blog for the year, it did not work out.
With my dad passing in October, and the COVID quarantine in 2020, I was thankful we finished school! The blog was not able to record down many good stuff we did this year.

I actually was very proud of how we did, and how much effort I (and the girls) put in this year!

This was the plan I did in the beginning of the year.

Some of the memories and things I enjoyed were...

1. A different way to teach history/bible
This year I decided I would prepare the teaching more. Last time we did CtG, we read through Streams, the encyclopedia, etc, like all good Charlotte Masoners would with living books. The kids did not understand much and retained almost nothing. Maybe I wasn't doing it right, and maybe they were rather young then.

This year I used presentation to give them some visual aids as I taught or read.

This was an example.

We watched short videos quite often. The Usborne Encyclopedia quick-links had great resources.

I felt that the kids were able to engage more, understand better, and retain more. Last time we had a second grader and fourth grader. This time the second grader is a seven grader, and we have a second grader and fifth. Big Sis DEFINITELY learnt a lot more.

They also did their "notebook" pages on the computer and that allowed them to add in a lot of graphics and information.

This is one example from Big Sis' notebook.

And this one an example from Baby Sis'.

For bible, I used this site to show the illustrations as I read the passages. The visuals helped a lot.

2. Read alouds
We read Treasure of the Snow, Tanglewoods Secret, and Children's Homer.
The kids enjoyed them a lot. I used the girls' shopkins to act out the characters in the Children's Homer and that helped so much that now Silly Chili is permanently Telemachus.

3. Science
We also worked at science this year. We tried a lot of the experiments in Science in the Beginning fo the younger girls. I am especially proud we managed to grow the bean plant this year.

For Big Sis (who did General Science) and Big Bro (Biology) we tried using Virtual Homechool Group's free videos. I'm really grateful for the efforts these moms put in for the teaching! We did most of the tests from the site, but near the end, they prefer reading the Apologia textbooks on their own. I personally think that the teachers did an amazing job teaching on VHSG. I'd rather use that. But my children apparently think otherwise.

4. Bible Memorization
We did all the bible memorization and we did a review of all of the verses on the last day and it was a blast.

The girls did really well.

5. Activities

I tried to put in activities as much as we could. The ten plagues activities/snacks was a great hit!

FROGS!!!

gnats

Frog eggs (boba actually)

boils

Hail!!

locusts (Mike N Ikes)

First Born: Sourpatch kids

We made unleavened bread

The Senet game was really fun!

We did some lapbooks for Aesop's Fables

6. Foreign Language

We changed to this book for Mandarin Chinese this year and I felt it was really helpful. Big Sis and Big Bro used it. The younger ones just use duolingo. Next year, I will prepare more worksheets to work with them using the duolingo syllabus.

7. Growth in lifeskills

The children learnt to do more chores at home since Wee Bro was born. This year they continued to learn to cook more independently, clean, and babysit Wee Bro. Precious skills.

8. Highschool

I am so thankful that Big Bro adapted to the highschool work really well. He had to do his work independently most of the time. There were many times the work was a bit tough, and other times, too relaxed. But my goal for him this year was to get used to working independently, and for me to get a hang of highschool work. I think we accomplished that.

We did switch Iliad to Black Ships of Troy. However, we kept Odyssey and I was very glad we did.

We invested in the microsope and it was fun! These photos were taken by an iphone put on the eye piece.