Family Schooling Summary

This week was pretty similar to the last couple weeks of reading and math. Big sister A does great reading the "I can read" books, but she misses the ease and familiarity of the Bob books. We got a fun book from the library about Cleopatra, and also had a field trip to the midwives for my monthly appt. The kids love looking at the posters illustrating how the baby grows and looks inside the tummy. They also like to hear the heart go "thump thump" on the doppler.
I have been working away on the syllabus and curriculum for the 16 week Cultural Anthropology class that I am teaching for our homeschool co-op.  Since their are a lot of articles and excerpts from various text books I decided to make a "Course Packet". It is huge! It will be double sided and bound when I get the copies made for my students.  They will have weekly reading assignments and focus questions on each set of readings included in the packet.  They will also have a big final "Ethnography Project" on a cultural group of their choice.  It has been a lot of work to prepare, but I am hoping that having it all put together (mostly) ahead of time will make the week-by-week preparation a lot easier.

My class is for students ages 13 and up.  And while I am teaching and helping teach other classes, all 3 of the kiddos will be enrolled in their own classes. Baby S will just do nursery type classes, but brother M and big sister A are going to have some great science, math, and music classes.

Speaking of music classes, we just finished our last "Music Together" class for the Summer.  Daddy joined us and we had ice cream at 16 Handles afterwords.  I tried not to get any of the other kids/classmates in the pics, since I was planning to post them online.  This instrument extravaganza is one of their favorite parts of the class.  Baby S also loves the box of shaker eggs.  I think big sister A loves the dancing with scarves and marching songs the best.  I like the musical theory behind music together and I thought our teachers very "laissez-faire" attitude was nice and allowed each child to approach the music at whatever level they were feeling interested.