Are we doing any regular school?

Besides being guinea pigs for Review Crew items? Oh, yes. I just haven't been blogging about it lately--too busy doing school. We're in the eighth week of our fall term, which is supposed to go twelve weeks but I'm allowing the extra couple of weeks before Christmas in case things take longer than they do.

We are still doing workboxes, although our way of using them is still evolving for our family. Lately I've been putting all of Crayons' "work with Mom" boxes first, so we spend the hour or so of morning workbox time on those; then her independent ones come after, and she does those while I work with Ponytails in the afternoon. Vice versa for Ponytails. We also have three group times during the day--first thing in the morning, at the end of the morning, and at 2:00 in the afternoon on the days that we don't have dance or co-op.

Most things are working out pretty well. Ponytails says she likes Key to Geometry, and Apologia General Science with Mr. Fixit is going fine too. We are continuing with Write with the Best for composition, and with some of the other books we do together like The Book of Think, Ocean of Truth (Newton biography), Analogies, and Larry Burkett's money workbook. She does history mostly on her own, from Genevieve Foster's Abraham Lincoln's World. When we have some extra time we play Perquackey.

Crayons' history alternates between several books: H.E. Marshall's Canada's Story with Cartier Discovers the St. Lawrence as a supplement, and Marshall's An Island Story for British history, though right now we're reading Good Queen Bess instead of those chapters from AIS. We also read from Kingsley's The Heroes and Lassie-Come-Home. Crayons reads her tall-tales book to herself, and also listens in on readings from Pyle's King Arthur and Swiss Family Robinson. And Mr. Pipes and Bible stories first thing in the morning.

For math, Crayons is doing a mixture most days, things from Miquon Math, Childcraft's Mathemagic book, Calculadder, and time-telling review. We also just learned a different game to play with dominoes, Muggins, and we've been doing that during math time. These are the rules we're using, but I know there are variations. We've also started All About Spelling, a hands-on curriculum that uses magnetic letter tiles.

We're continuing with some of the other group materials that we bought or were given to use this year: Nutrition 101 for health, Roots and Fruits vocabulary, and Artistic Pursuits. This week I made the decision that we'll drop French until after Christmas--there's just too much else to do right now. The girls enjoy listening to the Easy French dialogues, but I don't think a lot of learning has happened with them yet this year; they're a bit too basic for Ponytails, but I don't want to do them just with Crayons. I'll have to figure out a different way to work with everybody's needs.

I've probably forgotten some things we do (like memory work), but those are the basics most days.