Homeschool Recap: Beyond Little Hearts Unit 5 & More!
Hi there, again! Another week of second grade is done. I know we all have weeks we just try to get through and other weeks where you just want to bottle at that learning and joy of discovery! But have you ever had a week that seem to be a perfect mix of both? This was a weird week, lol!
History: To be honest, we are feeling a little weighed down with the Pilgrims time in Holland, lol. Are they ever going to leave? We know they go to America. It has to be soon right? Sigh. I love these little anecdotal stories in the books that HOD has selected. However, it’s hard to keep my son’s interest when all he wants to hear about is the Mayflower and America. A bright spot this week was making these cute tulip pots. We learned about a child who was willing to sell her rare pink tulip to help earn her dad’s fare to come be with her in Holland. It was a precious little story, but again, my son did not get all the feels on that way. Not a bit, lol. He like using the yarn to ‘make his tulip grow.” We end each week in history by spending a couple days in My Story from Master Books. I can’t really figure out what the secret is, but we both simply love this social studies program and look forward to it weekly. This week we started discussing facts about our state. I was super impressed with how he drew the state boundary formed by the river.
image from amazon.com
Science: I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before, but we do science daily. I try to have some activity/object lesson/experiment daily also. Most science curriculum for second grade only have enough lessons to do 2-3 days per week of science. So I have had to seriously bulk up out RSO Earth and Space Level 1. They offer so many suggestions it isn’t hard to do. However, one of the things I added on my own are these Usborne science books. You may be familiar with them from My Father’s World and Sonlight programs. After doing this week’s scheduled activities in RSO, I let my son look through Science with Water and pick out 3 experiments to do next week for our science time. Score! He LOVED deciding our science activities for the week. I’ll have to let him do that more often. He did also enjoy the planned activities for this week. We learned about the water cycle and built an ocean in a bowl to demonstrate how salty water becomes fresh. We both were amazed that water never goes away, it just changes states. The same water that God created on Day 3 of Creation Week has been continuously recycling for millennia to sustain life. I don’t think I ever thought of it that way!
photo from amazon.com
Reading: This week went better after switching to BJU Press Reading 2. However, the announcement of ‘reading time’ still brings tears. He really liked it last year, so we had a heart-to-heart to get to the bottom of his ‘great sorrow.’ It turns out, he really dislikes silent reading. While I realize this is a necessary skill, perhaps he is not reading to start working on that one just yet. I suggested that we take break from that and go back to reading out loud like last year. We will try silent reading again after Christmas. This news brought great rejoicing. We’ll see how he feels about actually doing it next week.
Language Arts: I’ve decided to add in some extra practice with BJU Press English 2. I was given the Teacher’s Manual free, so I decided to use it instead of searching for something else. Thanks to moving poetry reading to lunch time a couple weeks ago, I have freed up some time to do the extra LA without adding to our day. I am not doing the BJU program in its entirety. I’m just adding in one more day and pulling from it to go along with what we are already covering in the LA box with HOD. We are still doing our Evan Moor Super Sentences one day per week, also.
Please let me know if you would like any specific video reviews of anything mentioned in my week-by-week posts. I try to show as much as I can, but videos take a little longer for me to get together. I do have many things up on my YouTube channel already, so have a look!
