Fieldtrips, history, and lit...

These past few weeks have been fun, exciting, and a bit fast-paced.  We went to a local festival called Kentuck, and the girls had a blast riding the bus there.  (I promised them I would park the car and we'd take the shuttle).

Because I mostly got video footage, and I haven't taken the time to edit my videos, I won't be posting them :-( but you can trust they had tons of fun!  Face painting among other crafts.  It was fun.  I think the part they liked the best was riding on the bus.

We've also been going to our bi-weekly science and geography labs, and attending our weekly homeschool co-op.  In between these days, we've worked on all of our core subjects-- and, of course, I've been working on rebuilding my web business, which I'm really excited about.

As for core subjects, we're still working on missing addends in Saxon 5/4.  I think we'll be in 5/4 for at least another year, and I'm perfectly relaxed with that since we started it in grade 3...so we are just basically cruising our way through it and taking breaks in between to learn our multiplication tables.    In American History, we have really been enjoying our unit on the westward expansion and the 49'ers in BJU's American Heritage 3.  We finished up that unit last week by panning for gold:

Add a little dirt, water, and some gravel the "gold nuggets" and we have ourselves a gold-panning activity.

At least the rocks we painted gold the other week seem like real gold!

The girls got dirty and had a lot of fun with that.

Our next chapter in American Heritage is on folktale and American stories like Johnny Appleseed.  It's kind of a nice break from learning about the colonies and states.

Will I use BJU American history again next year?  Well, the lessons journey through American history all the way up through the 5th grade level.  I'm not quite sure I want the kids to still be on American history that long.  At some point before 5th grade I wanted to study world history with them...so we'll see.  But I do highly recommend BJU for history-- good stuff!

English has been really easy this year.  Again, we are using BJU- English 3.  I don't have the teacher's manual, but with just the student notebook we've been able to pull off pretty easy and quick language arts sessions each school day.  Couple that with loads of reading on her spare time and natural handwriting practice through letter-writing, and I think our language arts program has been complete this year.  What I like about the BJU English book is that it goes beyond your language basics (ex.- "what is a verb? noun? pronoun? etc.) and covers letter-writing, story-writing, persuasive essay writing...that kind of stuff.  I also supplement lessons from time to time with a workbook I bought from Barnes and Noble this past summer (Harcourt Complete Curriculum).  Not to mention, anytime kids want some school fun, all we have to do is dig up some fun websites for them...StoryNory is great for literature.  Spelling City is pretty useful too.

I've got a notebook full of websites I have run across and enjoyed and I should do a post just on that soon.

Til next time...