School Days, School Days

John left 4 1/2 weeks ago for Ft Benning for some Army Training. He will be gone for almost 6 months all together. We have really missed him but since he has been gone we have been very busy.We started back to school 4 Mondays ago. We have really been enjoying it this year!!! We are using a Charlotte Mason based approach to education and are loving it. We have fun reading, reading, and reading. The kids have really enjoyed reading about various birds in the Burgess Bird Book, and about fairy tales in the Blue Fairy Book. They have learned some great classic information which will help them in the Great Conversation. They learned about the Brave 300 Spartans who held back the Persain invasion of Greece and about Alexander the Great and his horse. They have learned about the coming of the Romans to England and how the Brittans were so brave and feriece that Cesear left with much respect for them. We are learning about Geography through a great Caldecot book named Paddle to the Sea. So far they have learned about the Great Lakes and how the rivers flow from one to the other and thus on to the Ocean.Poetry is one of their favorites. They love to hear great poetry about children like themselves. Right now Beauty and the Beast stands out as the favorite story by far. At first, as I was reading it, Hannah tried to tell me that that was not how it went (she only knew the disney version), but soon she was very interested and wanted to know how it would end. She told her daddy all about it! For math we are learning with a great program called Math U See. The kids love playing with the blocks to learn place value and figure out problems. I am most excited about our new Spell to Write and Read program. So far the kids have learned all of the sounds of all of the letters and have them well memorized. They are currently working on the multiletter phonograms (or blends) and are doing very well memorizing them. We will start our first spelling list of 20 words on Monday. I dictated the word "apron" yesterday to Hannah and she spelled it correctly!!! The emphasis of this program is to learn all of the sounds of letters and multi letter phonograms first, spell second, and learn to write and read as a result of correct spelling. So far I see the benefit and am excited.On Wednesdays Hannah and Bekah are going to a co-op. They are taking Art, Math, and Spanish there. They spend an hour on each and come home at 12:30. Today was their first day and they had so much fun. We have some Spanish homework to work on for next week.Hannah and Bekah will be taking Ballet on Thursday afternoon. It is with a Christian fine arts company and has a basis in letting our talents be our worship. The kids are so excited about this! We went and got their ballet shoes on Monday and they have been wanting to wear them.Fridays are our fun day.We go on Nature Walks. We usually go to the Roper Mountain Science Center. While there we walk on the nature trails and look for new things to see (bugs, turtles, moss, fungus, etc...), and then head to the butterfly garden and pond. There is lots of great pond life and beautiful flowers to study.This past friday we went to the Childrens Garden in Downtown Greenville. The kids got to look at the river and see how the water flows. They saw ducks and we discussed how the water flows off of their backs. They identified flowers and smelled some of the more fragrant plants in the herb garden. It was a lot of fun for them. Afterwards we made a trip to the interactive fountain where they had fun playing and getting wet.