Weekly Wrap-Up: High School The Easy Way

I wrote a few weeks back about having a touchstone, something to keep me focused on our goals. After the first week, I can tell this is going to be the most relaxed and easy to keep schedule we have ever had. It makes me wonder why it took me so long to see the way to making Charlotte Mason's ideas really stick...the key is the planning, planning with a prayerful attitude.

Mr. B is loving his new courses and the notebook set-up we have using the Notebooking Treasury from NotebookingPages.com. I shared how I set up his timeline in an earlier post and he loves the freedom that we built into the daily work to pick and choose his topics for the timeline and the follow-up notebook pages. The key again is planning, having a supply of notebook pages that will work for a high schooler. The Book of Centuries pages are so flexible that I just printed out a few of each style and he is working on them as he does his reading in history, literature, art, composer study, and poetry. They then are filed in his timeline binder behind the appropriate tabs.

He is really enjoying the Thinkwell American Government course so far and he has asked me to come over and watch a few of the segments with him so we can talk about them together. I think that means it is a success., oral narration without being asked to do so! The segment we talked about yesterday was a video poll of average people being asked questions about government: What is government? Why do we need government? These thoughts tied in nicely with our Bible reading this week and I was pleased to hear Mr. B talk about those connections as he narrated back his assignments.

Back to our week....



We had pie this week...scrumptious apple pie that Mr. B baked from apples we got at the apple orchard. His sister said that she thought it was the best apple pie she had ever eaten. It was good, very good.


We listened to Carl Orff's Carmen Burana and the YouTube version.

We read some Edna St. Vincent Millay.

City Trees
The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
(excerpt)

Mr. B has been itching to start his human anatomy course so we did a little vocabulary work over the summer but now we are really getting into the meat of it. There is so much vocabulary...we have used Flashcard Machine in the past and I think it is time to start again. I highly recommend this website to adapt to your needs. Here is the set we are adding to as we go along: Human Anatomy Word Roots/Prefixes/Suffixes.

Literature this week included reading some chapters in The Grapes of Wrath and a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. Mr. B is keeping an on-going list of points for an essay on The Grapes of Wrath and writing a character analysis of Tom Joad. I wrote a Squidoo lens on John Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath if you are interested in reading that for your own study of the book.

That about wraps up our week as far as academics go. We are keeping an A and a B week schedule so next week he will be adding in a few new courses ....can't wait to share those!

Week 1 is complete!


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