It has been awhile since I have given an update.
The Mustangs are the Mustangs. If one is good the other is NOT. They love doing our Bible stories & their "memory work" amazes me. They both are learning their versions of The Golden Rules & it is so cute. I will have to post a video soon. Tucker loves doing his maze books & blew me away this week when he was able to build all his letters (to this point: A-H) using his HWOT blocks. Trevor has been a VERY busy & loud Mustang lately. He is by far my wildest outlaw & we definitely go rounds in the arena. lol Trevor loves doing his finger-play activities & has learned just about all his colors. Tucker is able to identify most of his shapes, knows all his colors & is doing great with his counting. We have so much fun with our letters each week, but recognition is slow.
Momma's Boy has been doing fantastic in school!
Math: he is averaging 2 lesson a week! Recently he learned to round to the 1,000 place & is proud to say he can multiply double digit numbers.
Reading: We have been reading a variety of books. He has fallen in love with the Nature Readers from
Christian Liberty Press. In fact, I've caught him reading them FOR FUN!! He has also been reading some of the First Favorites from
Veritas Press. He read *The Clown of God a few weeks ago & we used the FIAR & Beautiful Feet literature guides. We had a great time reading this book & learning new words in Italian. This also corresponded to our humanities studies with TOG. We have focused more on reading the past few weeks & lightened the load with phonics. We will begin our last level with Hooked on Phonics next week.
Language: has been a lot of fun lately. He is currently working on making a book that includes a poem of the months. His illustrations are beautiful. I can't wait until he is done & I can share. Grammar has been tying in nicely with our language lessons, as they are both introducing contractions. Tyler knows what verbs & nouns are (common & proper), can identify them in a sentence & has been learning about helping verbs. I can't tell you enough how much he has learned from using First Language Lessons.
History/Humanities: We have begun Unit 2 Renaissance & Reformation (Year 2)
What a GREAT time we are having! It has been over a month since we changed from 1 week to 2 weeks per TOG week plan & it has made a world of difference (not to mention focusing only on LG work). We are loving this unit. Tyler has learned a lot about Leonardo da Vinci. We read a couple books & watched a few movies - including the Nest movie (review on these soon). We have spent the last 2 weeks with Christopher Columbus & have learned so much. We watched movies & read several books on Columbus & his voyage. Using REAL books in this area has been great because it gave a true depiction of Columbus' character & true motives. We added to our reading with the Beautiful Feet literature guides section on Columbus & used the Nest video activities as well. Momma's boy aced his evaluations & has added some great pages to his lapbook:
He can identify & name a few da Vinci paintings.
Daddy's Girl has now been in public school for 6 weeks.
She is doing good & adapted to the new routine fabulously. We have been so proud of her responsibility with getting herself up & ready in time for the bus at 6:30 am. Her grades are great for the most part. We haven't seen any major areas for concern, but we have been very reassured by placing her in 4th grade. She definitely isn't struggling. Her grades are more a matter of shear will right now. She is developing a great relationship with her teacher & is seeing what a teachers job is. She still has a difficult time recognizing the similarities to the issues she had at home with me being the teacher & her teacher just being her teacher. Ex. It would infuriate her for me to correct her work - I was "picking on her." However, her teacher now does it & it isn't a big deal. She seems to really like PE :) -- she looks forward to the days they go on hikes (gotta love PE in the country!). The majority of her work seems to be preparation for the upcoming state standardized test. I'll save our "public school experiences" to this point for another post. :) Taylor is happy & we are working on building our relationship. I want to have a more detailed post soon, but I do want to share that we have been spending "special" time together (tea parties, cuddling in bed, etc.) reading Beautiful Girlhood & using a guide with it. It has given us both a tremendous insight to this transitional phase she is currently in/going through - helping me realize a lot of our issues that I thought were "homeschool" are just girlhood. -- UGGG. Now I know why we have more boys that girls. :) I love her so much & have really enjoyed my special time with her.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that we added the Nest Movies to a couple of topics we have focused on during our TOG studies. I saw these videos at our Homeschool Convention last year & was very interested; however, in my opinion, they were pretty expensive for a movie that was less than an hour long. I had already blown my budget, so I had to pass on purchasing any of the Nest Videos. Fortunately for us, my mom got them! The Nest Family Entertainment has a series of animated videos from the Old & New Testament & another series of American Hero Classics. My type A personality has only allowed us to watch the videos as we come across the topics in our studies. My first video of this series was Christopher Columbus (available at Nest Entertainment for $28.95). The kids loved this movie & were educated while watching it. -- Even the Mustangs!! The bonus to these movies is that they are interactive. At the end of each movie are 3 levels of quizzes: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced. Each quiz has several questions with multiple choice answers. The cool thing about this is that if the kids don't know the answer you can click on a "find the answer" option, in which a short clip from the video that gives the answer is replayed. There is also an option to see a list of Godly Character traits the person in the video may have displayed to discuss with your children. Along with the interactive movie, a resources book is included. Momma's Boy really enjoyed doing the activities from this book & they made a great addition to his lapbook. Inside the resource book you will find coloring pages, a list of review questions, puzzles, games & lists of activities (all categorized by learning levels & reproducible for non-commercial use). I have found that the "extras" included with this book explain (in my opinion) the high price. $28 for a movie is a lot of money; however, these aren't just movies - they are complete learning systems with great resources to ensure your child was learning while being entertained. I also would like to add another wonderful bonus to these videos -- these are 100% Christian based videos. Throughout the video your child will see God's work in the role of these characters that are so profound to HIS-story. 
