The St. Joseph Academy for Wayward Children has strayed off the path. Things just haven't gone according to plan since Thanksgiving - with holidays, sicknesses, husband dear having two weeks off. Everybody is off schedule and we were starting later and later (waiting for Mr P), because we start our day with prayer all together. We also are not fitting in the things I really want to fit in. Basically, it came to a head last week when Mr P and Miss E were assigned to just fill in the blanks of their lessons and worksheets. Time for a change!

I rescheduled things so that we have Math, Spelling/Phonics, and Penmanship every day. Tuesday and Thursday we have language and Social Studies. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are Science days and Culture/Religion/Art. Friday is more of a day for review, working on weak skills from the other days, and experiments and projects. This is the day we will do crafts, work on lapbooks, etc. Thursday nights I work from 10pm - Midnight, so I needed a more unstructured child-led day.

I wrote out complete and detailed lesson plans for the next 2 weeks, and sketched out a couple more. This is huge because we tend to enjoy rabbit trails, and I'm an unschooler at heart.

Miss E loves to do worksheets, so I copies and printed ones to go with her spelling. I made a worksheet of reading comprehension questions for Mr P, and bought him a new language book at the Barnes and Noble Educator Sale. Miss E loves our language book, First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind, but Mr P hates it. We are using CHC spellers, and there are language lessons built in hter as well (alphabetizing words, looking things up in the dictionary, punctuating paragraphs.)

I took a cue for Dawn at By Sun and Candlelight and filled in my themes for January (and got a start of February).

This month, we're feeding the birds, with a birdfeeder in the front and a birdbath in the back. The birdbath we made from a blue enamel camping plate. We've started a nature notebook. I print off the appropriate template here and the kids color in the birds with the plumage that they've seen. Then we go here to identify it. I like this site because it steps you through identification and then you can listen to the bird calls. We have a pair of cardinals and a pair of mocking birds, have seen an Acadia Flycatcher, a house finch, and a Carolina wren.

We will be planning the garden and sowing the cool weather crops.

We are enjoying oatmeal and winter citrus.

We are building Pinewood Derby cars for scouts (and AC Moore had wooden car craft projectes for $1, so the non-Scouts are building those.)

We will be celebrating the Feast of St. Agnes today, January 21.
I will read the story from "57 Stories of Saints for Boys and Girls". I ran off a copy of the Colosseum coloring page for the older kids (Mr R is home from school today) and the little ones will color a picture of a lamb. The littlies also have a craft - gluing cotton ball "fleece" to a lamb. Then we will attempt cookies. Husband dear unexpectedly returned home from work at 8:30 am and Baby X is a crankpot, so cookies might not get made.

We are getting into the swing of Ancient Egypt for World History. We'll be doing cuneiform tomorrow.

I still need to plan some Kindergarten and Preschool weekly themes. This week is going to be letter A for the littles (good review for Mr S too) and I think... penguins, because that is a current hot topic of interest for now. I also want to do the 5 senses, Valentine's day, My Family, Pets, and several other themes.

Sprittibee is also having the January doldrums, it seems and she's starting fresh this week also.

Labels: education, Family Life, Montessori Mondays