Spelling

I'm sure I've said we would not be covering spelling as a distinct subject. I can't see the use of it myself. I learned spelling by reading and that was that. However my husband decided that was most certainly not that after working on a poem with Catherine and suggested she do some spelling. I rolled my eyes but asked Catherine if she'd like to try it and she said yes. I told her sternly it would mean more drills like Calculadder. Her eyes lit up.

Oh yeah, I forgot, she loves drills.

So out Language Arts period of the day will now be spelling and grammar with creative writing and punctuation on alternating days. To think, I was a radical unschooler less than a year ago! But wait, that's not it. We're also adding Latin and Greek roots (here is a site with a fantastic list). Catherine really wants to learn ancient Greek and Spanish but we've also got french on the menu and a plan for science that includes learning scientific lingo. Latin and Greek roots would be a great way to get a foundation for learning those languages and understanding science lingo.

"But it's not going to help me at all when I learn Japanese!" Catherine laughingly said this morning.

Japanese? Oboy.

With math we're working through our Math Mammoth Multiplication book. Once again I have to stress how much I love this series. They're clear and uncluttered and inexpensive. $40 bought me our core elementary math curriculum and remains the best deal I've gotten in terms of homeschooling curriculum. Poor Singapore Math sits ignored on a bottom shelf somewhere, the target of my daughter's passionate hate.

Science was a little worksheet on observation and inference. It was a little dopey and Catherine wasn't too impressed by it. I can't offer a link unfortunately because the author is taking the site down.

History was better. We listened to Story of the World, Chapter 4 and then an didactivity sheet on hieroglyphs and scribes and I hit a home run on that sheet. I read the information on the sheet and then we took a look at a couple of charts that showed what certain symbols meant. One is shown below.



Then the fun part. The worksheet gives a little story in hieroglyphs that you have to decipher! We both had a ball with that.

Later as Catherine was colouring, Harry and I sat down with an alphabet and number poster and a bunch of poker chips. I have no real plan for Harry but I've learned that if you just grab some odd resources, something will fall into place. And it did. We counted, added and subtracted the chips. We sang the alphabet. I called out letters and numbers and Harry rushed to cover them with poker chips.

I swear, one of the most fundamental homeschooling resources is a dollar-store set of poker chips.

All in all a brilliant day. Probably helped by all the silliness of yesterday and an early bedtime last night.