Homeschool Update December

We just finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, using the Arrow Guide from Brave Writer to study literary devices, vocabulary, capitalization and dialogue markers. I was happy (but not surprised) to see that Marko was able to follow the story and the activities even though the guide is for grades 3-5. I have to modify his writing to what the guide calls "Jot It Down" - which basically means he has great ideas and I should just write them for him, unless he grabs the pencil away from me and wants to write independently. This would be impossible in a classroom setting, but it works quite well at home. I'm saving these drafts in the hopes that they will look impressive next to whatever he will be able to produce on his own by June. Focus on progress. To get through this book, I borrowed an audio copy of the book from the library and we listened to it in the car. Nobody talks or fights because they want to hear the story, although Max falls asleep, more often than not. Our next book is Artemis Fowl and now that I know how these Arrow guides work, I think we'll be going a lot deeper with it.

We have still been plugging through the Spectrum math workbooks and alternating that with Khan Academy. Marko just needs to keep practice sums/differences to 100, but Laurel is going to get into geometry and is going to need a lot of instruction for that. I'm going to take a break from the workbooks and Khan until January and just play games.

I got a bunch of the Girl Scout Badges that we probably aren't going to do with our troop and Laurel is going to work through some of those to meet her social studies/civics standards.

We've been watching a lot of Crash Course World Mythology videos, singing along to holiday songs, and doing some HIIT inside because it's super cold and gloomy outside all the time. Youtube makes it so easy right now and I'm sure it's going to be either riddled with ads or require a subscription before long.