Tag: intentions

Education Intentions: Week 8

This week, we will spend one day at Classical Conversations, one morning at the dentist, one afternoon celebrating beautiful things with our Charlotte Mason friends, and a morning at programming and electronics.  I honestly don’t know if we can do it all, but all this stuff doesn’t usually happen on the same week. We’ll do our best.

Rejoice: I will be starting my early mornings with scripture, writing morning pages, and often a walk with my neighbor.

Relate: We’ll cook, clean and eat together several times a day, and apparently there will be plenty of time for conversations and audiobooks in the car.

Remember: We are aiming for reviewing our memory work four days this week. I have one kid who needs to memorize a paragraph from the Declaration of Independence, and two kids planning to recite Hilaire Belloc’s “Rebecca who Slammed Doors and Perished Miserably” next week in class. We have all been assigned to memorize the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. One kid has a new violin piece to learn and needs to be familiar with the first Chorus speech in Henry V, and one needs to learn all of the songs from Lion King Jr. 

Reason:  We plan four days of math and four days of grammar (English or Latin depending on the student). One also has homework for his electronics and JavaScript classes.

Read: We’ll read about an hour a day silently, broken into chunks. That will include reading the assigned ready for the older kid and free reading for the younger boys. We’ll aim for most of our ongoing read alouds. We’ll read bits of The World of Captain John Smith, Wild Animals I Have Known, Pilgrim’s Progress, Plutarch’s Publicola, Trial and Triumph, and Treasure Island. (Short lessons mean that we’ll be spending 15-20 minutes on each of those, so that list isn’t as long as it seems like.)

Record: The younger boys will do copywork and and IEW lesson. The older guy has an essay to write on The Scarlet Letter, and we all need to add to timelines and such.

Restore: The beautiful things we’ll look in this week include Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait. For me, this will include reading and teaching Latin to some moms. I will also be intentional about being home most evenings. For my boys, this means having free time after lunch (for the younger boys) and in the late afternoon and evening (for the big kid). It will mean going to bed on time.

It is going to be a crazy week…. the second one in a row. Next week, we have more margin, and I am grateful for that.

Week 6 in Review and Week 7 Intentions

I don’t know what happened to last week. I had a migraine for three days, and it really slowed me down. I took a lot of naps. I really feel like we half did most of our studies for the week. We did some work every day. I just wasn’t nearly as into it all as I wanted to be. Last week was supposed to be a heavier schoolwork week as we prepared for this coming week.  That didn’t work out for us.

This week holds an annual project that is near and dear to our hearts, but it will take us away from our books and off to community service for a day.  It will be a great day of hard work and celebration. We have outside classes on two day and violin lessons on a third. Windows will be replaced one morning, and the exterminator is coming another morning to quell the ants. Next week, I will be purposing to have less activity around here. For this week, well… some weeks are like that.

Since we didn’t manage to get things together last week, I will be scaling back Week 7 to keep my sanity. We will have a goal of accomplishing most of the things required for classes, but once I look over it all, I will intentionally choose what we will leave undone. I don’t worry about that too much because I know that there were days this summer when it was too hot to breathe outside, and on those days we did a little schoolwork.

We’ll aim for our Morning Meeting, one silent reading half-hour, one read aloud (instead of two), math, grammar, copywork, and spelling. They will dictate their IEW papers, and I’ll type them. We’ll edit them together. For my Freshman, he’ll still need to do his work for class.  That is just how it is. I will look for ways to help him along: only the odd numbered sentences to translate for Latin (or only the Latin to English exercises), only half of the review section of each math lesson, a timer to help keep him on task, an audiobook to help pace reading of a more difficult piece of fiction, and that sort of thing.

I also have classes to prepare for and things to read, but those things will have to wait their turn.

Plans for School, Week 5

Truth

  • Daily reading from Bible
  • Continue to memorize Ephesians 6
  • a few pages from Pilgrim’s Progress
  • Hymn to learn: The Solid Rock (My Hope is Built on Nothing Less)

Beauty

  • Rembrandt’s The Night Watch
  • Plutarch: Publicola, reading 5
  • Christina Rossetti: one poem daily
  • Beethoven, Ecossaise and some of the biography
  • Intro to Shakespeare’s Henry V

Goodness

  • Genevieve Foster’s The World of Captain John Smith, 10 pages
  • Science in the Scientific Revolution, lessons 1-4 labs with friends; read 5-8 for next week
  • Treasure Island, five chapters
  • Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, “Lobo,” finish chapter.
  • Morning Meeting x4 with memory work review
  • Folk Song: You’re a Grand Old Flag
  • Thinking about What Makes a Hero?
  • Golf, JavaScript, and Electronics classes for Micah
  • Taekwondo for all the boys