Going Against the Flow: Term Four: Week One ~ Stop Motion, Books, and Birthday Parties

Here we are - we have arrived at Term Four - the last term of the 2021 school year.

The promise from our government and health professionals is that life will get back to normal as we begin to unlock now that we have reached the 70% full vaccination point (16 years and older mind you). We shall see... I don't have a lot of faith in humanity anymore sadly. As most of the new "freedoms" are for the vaccinated only, I predict several weeks of unrest and rising numbers of COVID cases, as I just don't trust people to think about the collective community rather than themselves as individuals. So I will continue to look towards God, work hard to protect my family in the ways that my husband and I feel are best for the five of us, and forget about the rest.

I kept our first week of the term VERY simple for a variety of reasons. First of all, daylight savings began and that loss of one measly hour of sleep is more difficult than it seems. It took me the entire week to adjust. Secondly, we are adding read alouds back into our routine and removing a LOT of online learning (YAY) and I knew this was going to upset the schedule as we found our new normal.

So my focus for this first week was math and reading aloud and not much else. Exercise went by the wayside (although I managed a couple of days of walking when I did grocery shopping and collected the library books), and the schedule got out of whack on more than one day of the week. But it feels so good to have our library books back for history, geography, science and health, and we are looking forward to all the learning we will do as we wind up the year. Next week we will be adding everything back in: daily exercise, writing, spelling, grammar, handwriting, and art, and it will be full speed ahead until the end of the year.

Recently Munchkin has been borrowing my big (DSLR) camera to practice his stop motion skills

I thought since we have our library books back again, I would give a brief explanation (with photographic examples) of how our reading aloud goes through a typical day. In the picture above are the character books that I read to the boys. The books I choose for this segment of reading include anything that has a moral or lesson, or teaches them skills they will need when they are grown men. The Bible is ALWAYS part of this stack, plus we swap back and forth reading The Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass. Those are the "spine" of this reading time (so to speak) and then I choose other quality books from our home collection or the local library to supplement. The top book in this stack was a wonderful gift from another homeschool friend who has older boys.

In this picture are the books I read to Munchkin during our afternoon read aloud session... they are focused on his science and geography topics that we are currently learning. I have also started including some health/personal development books when I find ones I like, though it is an area where I have to be careful and really check the content before I just dive in and read it aloud.

These are Monster's books that we read and it is proving tricky to find time to fit all of them into one day because most of the content is too mature for the other boys. We are finding that it helps if we steal an hour to read in the late morning/early afternoon when the other two boys are playing together. The books in this stack represent his history, geography, literature and character development.

Stay tuned for some more photos next week as I completely forgot to include Monkey's books in this little tutorial of our reading aloud!!

Friday was our neighbour boy's 9th birthday and as we are allowed a "friend bubble" with one other family now during this lockdown, Munchkin and Mr B have been allowed to play together outside - which has been wonderful for both of them. So Mr B invited Munchkin, PLUS the other two boys, to help him celebrate with a pizza picnic outside on the shared driveway... They enjoyed pizza, meatballs, soft drink, and M&M cookies for dessert. It was a lovely way to end the first week of the term.

After all the yummy food the four of them played the game "Throw Throw Burrito" for several hours.

A Halloween drawing Munchkin one evening this week...

Independent reading selections for the two younger boys... Monkey read the How to Train Your Dragon book, the rest were books that Munchkin read through the week.

I finished reading both of these books aloud to all three boys this week. Munchkin is excited that we have finally finished the Narnia series and he really enjoyed it. All three boys loved the beautiful little stories in the James Herriot collection.