This week, I hit a huge obstacle with our science curriculum. Actually our problem was two fold. 1) I had scheduled too many science activities for each day. 2) The flow of activities as prescribed by Build Your Library did not make sense to me. Let’s break this down a bit more.

1) Too many activities

I started following the Build Your Library schedule of activities, but also had added some related lessons and some other pieces like the Blossom and Root Profiles in Science. Unfortunately, it was just too much! Arthur really does get into the science activities and wants to spend some time in one little thing. That’s great! But it was leaving a huge schedule backlog and I was scrambling to finish. Not a good feeling. I needed to drastically decrease the activities per day.

2) Flow doesn’t make sense

I had just started the BYL activities without looking at the larger scope. Late last week I started wondering if I needed to take a look at all the weeks and their lessons. And I realized that some of the lessons were just not where I would like them to be. I liked the lessons, just not the schedule.

This weekend, I spent a lot of time looking at all the science lessons, reordering them, and laying out a more manageable schedule for us to follow. We’ll see how this next week goes…

What We Studied

Even with the obstacles stated above, I still feel like we had a very successful homeschooling week. The obstacles were felt by me, not really by the kids.

Literature and Poetry

We finished The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. I ended up really enjoying the book. And Arthur seemed to finally settle in and enjoy the read aloud. We kept the activities to a minimum, but did draw our favorite scene from the book. Arthur chose Despereaux being born for his scene. I also sprinkled in some summer themed poems.

• The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

• Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature by Nicola Davies

• Our Big Home by Linda Glaser

Math

We sailed through another couple of units in our review. We’ll be finished with 1A very soon…

Social Studies

This was a big week for social studies! We officially started our history curriculum. We read about the general concept of history and quickly moved onto archaeology and evolution. The evolution days tied in nicely to our science unit about Charles Darwin from Blossom and Root. As an extra special activity on Saturday, I made Arthur a small archeology dig. He had to use the tools to uncover the “artifacts” (like coins, legos, and cars) and chart his findings on graph. Kinetic sand for the win.

As we studied the family tree for life on Earth and specifically the human race, we decided to make our own family tree. Arthur really got into creating this little tree. He had to have help to spell everyone’s names correctly, but did the rest himself.

• One Day a Dot by Ian Lendler

• Archaeologists Dig for Clues by Kate Duke

• Mary Leakey Biography

• I Used to be a Fish by Tom Sullivan

• It Started with a Big Bang by Floor Bal

• How Did I Get Here? By Philip Bunting

• Life by Martin Jenkins and Grahame Baker-Smith

• Continental Drift by Martin Ince

• Life on Earth by Steve Jenkins

• Darwin’s Tree of Life by Michael Bright

• Galapagos George by Jean Craighead George

• You are Stardust by Elin Kelsey

• Our Family Tree by Lisa Westberg Peters

• Who’s In My Family? By Robie H. Harris

• Me and My Family Tree by Joan Sweeney

• Grandmother Fish by Jonathan Tweet

• The World’s Most Amazing Lost Cities by Ann Weil

Science

This week’s science was a bit all over the place. We did spend some time outdoors looking for colors, finding predators and prey, and talking about summer.

• Hike by Pete Oswald

• Pollen by Darcy Pattison

Art

A lot of our art this week came from looking at various color books. We really got into the picture book Dancing Through Fields of Color about artist Helen Frankenthaler. We decided to use her art as inspiration for a project. We played around with adding different colors to our art projects.

• Pocket Full of Colors: The Magical World of Mary Blair, Disney Artist Extraordinaire by Amy Guglielmo

• The Crayon Man: The True Story of the Invention of Crayola Crayons by Natascha Biebow

• Dancing Through Fields of Color: The Story of Helen Frankenthaler by Elizabeth Brown

• Swatch by Julia Kenos

Music

We covered Beethoven this week with Classics for Kids, various picture books, and lots of listening for our journal. Arthur liked Beethoven more than Copland. Wonder how he’ll respond to Mozart next week?

• The 39 Apartments of Ludwig van Beethoven by Jonah Winter

Nature Play Day

We started our day making our own trail mix to take on our expeditions. Once we had loaded up, we went to explore the woods near our house. We looked for lots of colors, animal tracks, and various leaf shapes. We let the kids play at the playground for awhile before coming back to the house. We read some books about color and did some fun color activities. The littles had fun making a rainbow out of punched shapes. We finished up our Wednesday with some pool time.

• A Year with Mama Earth by Rebecca Grabill

Unit Theme

This week’s theme was colors! We played color games, sorted color teddy bears (really Quentin did this about 50 times this week), read books about colors, and found some cool videos about the artist and items from the picture books.

• Blue Chameleon by Emily Gravett

• Color Dance by Ann Jonas

• How the Crayons Saved the Unicorn by Monica Sweeney

• Cat’s Colors by Airlie Anderson

• Colors by Shelley Rotner and Anne Woodhull

• Festival of Colors by Kabir Sehgal

• Sky Color by Peter H. Reynolds

• Living Color by Steven Jenkins

• Neon Leon by Britta Teckentrup

• Colors by Felicia Law

• The Color Monster by Anna Llenas

• Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert

• White Rabbit’s Colors by Alan Baker

• Bears Sees Colors by Karma Wilson

• Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox

• Walk and See Colors

• The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt

• Red by Michael Hall

• Vivid by Julie Paschkis

• Green is a Chile Pepper by Roseanne Greenfield Thong

• Monsters Love Colors by Mike Austin

• Duck & Goose Colors by Tad Hills

• Colors Versus Shapes by Mike Boldt

• Every Color Soup by Jorey Hurley

• Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd

Misc.

Quentin has really gotten into sorting his color teddy bears. We’re going to make patterns next week.

Highs

• Another successful nature play day! Complete with backyard wading pool time!

• We finished The Tale of Despereaux, our first read aloud for the year!

Lows

• Not so much a Homeschool problem, but I developed a migraine Wednesday afternoon that affected the last few parts of school that day and most of Thursday. I was hurting and subsequently annoyed by Arthur’s inability to focus on the task at hand.

• Q’s a little behind on his letter work, but that’s ultimately okay.

Next Week

Our themes are Paleolithic and Neolithic Times for history and the Letter C for Quentin. We won’t have a unit theme (I’ve built in some lesser weeks to give us a rest). For Wednesday’s nature play day, we are going to Tree Adventure in Nebraska City to explore the outdoors and enjoy the weather before it gets cold. And we’re going to go see the Missouri River as a part of Tuesday’s science lesson.

Next up on the TBR pile: