Day 35: Foundations

 

 It feels like we are always behind.  I guess I need to cut back on our to do list...Instead I keep adding to it.  I have added another thing to the list but it is so important and worthwhile.  We used the Classical Conversation curriculum last year and loved it.  Foundations is amazing and I miss it, but Jake aged out and their next level, Challenge, wasn't enough reading for us (not to mention it is expensive).  I decided to add  Foundations back in to our curriculum.

 We just started cycle 3 (C.C. co-ops are doing cycle 2 this year) which covers U.S. History.  We will take the next 24 weeks to refresh our memory of a 164 point timeline we memorized last year.  We will also memorize a sentence (fact or the answer to a question) every week in these subjects: Timeline, history, geography (US), English, Latin, math, and science.  This is on top of what we are already learning.  It only takes a few minutes a day to work on the memorization and it is an amazing amount of information.

    The math is obviously review.  Week 1 is reviewing "skip counting for 1's & 2's".  Younger children (k-2ish) just memorize the numbers.  Older children recognize this is multiplication.  We skipped the 1's but did a quick review of the 2's.  Jake knows them but it is just a review that takes 45 seconds to run through.  I ask him what 2 x's 12 is and he gives me the answer as quickly as he can.  Review is a good thing. We will go all the way through 15's for multiplication and then move into things like: linear equivalents, area of a square, and the associative law of addition.   

 Geography will cover learning the states and their capitals, mountains ranges, bays, rivers, trails, etc.! 

We love the Timeline song and flash cards that we used last year.  We are going to be more diligent about reading all the information given on the back of all the cards each week.  We will read one or two each day and discuss it.

And we are going to hang the cards up under our chalkboard each week.  It will help remember it and cover up the wall that I need to paint but don't have the budget for right now.  We hung this weeks up with poster goo so we can take them down and read.  By the end of the 24 weeks we will have that spot and others full of cards because there are 7 cards for each week.  I found some of the science flashcards at a homeschooling consignment store a long time ago and they just happen to be for cycle 3 so we will read those and post them on another wall. We are going to be surrounded by information!  I love it.  The cycle 3 science is anatomy.  We haven't studied anatomy so it will be interesting to learn it. 

I think memorizing is so important and it fills in those pegs that, as Jake gets older, he will build upon and learn more about.  All the books we are reading are based on US history and now we will have facts memorized to make sure he is retaining the information too.

We actually went and had lunch/recess with our C.C. friends today.  We miss them all and were glad to have the chance to see them today.  I guess I should have added recess to the to do list. :)  We went to the library too. . . Okay, I guess we do accomplish a lot!

(Jake ended up reading pages 49-83 in "Traitor". Reading through page117 like I originally planned for him to do was a little to ambitious.)