First Turning - "the High"

There's been a lot going on around here. I'll attempt to do a brief summary...(but, first, this is a photo of Ethan taking in the contents of a book as he's sitting in his basket of books)

We recently did a homeschool "re-construction". It's necessary every now and then. Usually the "pre-construction" time periods are painful for me - nothing productive is really happening and excitement for learning has become close to extinct.

But, it's much like the theory about the cycles of life considered "turnings" from the book The Fourth Turning. The first turning being the "High", the second turning being the "Awakening", the third turning being the "Unraveling", and the fourth turning being the "Crisis". We just came out of the fourth turning and are now, once again, in the first turning - the "high". And boy are we ever! We are loving the opportunities homeschooling provides!

Along with doing our regular reading, writing, and math we are focusing much of our learning on History! Isn't it wonderful? For the next couple months or so we're learning about ancient to present

Greece

How could there be a couple months worth of learning about Greece? We realized how many neat things came from there! We'll be covering:

Aesop's Fables
Alexander the Great
Greek construction and buildings
Greek Gods
Greek Philosopher's
Olympics
Spartan Army

How fun is that? ...Well, I think it's exciting! Here's something else we'll be doing -

Green Hour Challenge!

It's made up of a set of 9 assignments and there's a fabulous book titled, "Handbook of Nature Study" we will be pulling a wonderful amount of information from throughout the assignments.

We'll spend time outdoors observing what we see, finding things we're interested in to focus on and do further investigating on. I'll be posting our entries on this blog.

We'll be observing, sketching, brainstorming, describing, and memorizing...and we get to do all of this enjoying and learning from the beautiful world Heavenly Father blessed us with - it'll be great!

Free Friday!

Friday's will be our reading day. We'll read any (or all) learning and fun books Tyra and Ethan chose from the library earlier in the week without having to write about what they learned from it...so, no strings attached. :) We'll focus a lot on poems and will work on writing our own as well.

We'll be checking out poems written by teens at the Sandy Library this month.

Along with all of this we'll be working on our garden thanks to SFG! The kids each have their own little 2x2 garden where they chose to plant things such as watermelon, lettuce, carrots, beets, and collard! I can't wait to see the results.

I'll be posting the photos from our big activity we're doing today which is

Movie Making

Tyra and Ethan's friends will be coming over and they'll create the story to and act in their very own movie...I hope they dress up! :) John will be recording and editing it and I will be....assisting wherever needed. The results will be posted soon.
All I can say, is there are so many wonderful, fun, and exciting things to enjoy and learn about and that's just what we're doing!

I've detached myself from the internet...I found it to be addicting and mind numbing. It reminds me of Elder Ballards talk to young mothers and the suggestion he gave to stay away from things that numb the mind such as the TV or the internet. He is SO right!

So, interestingly enough, even though I've started a whole new blog I'm cutting back, big time, on my computer time and only stopping by once every couple days or less - to do what I need to do (and stop by everyone's blogs every now and then). My other blog might just go to pots - and this one, being our homeschooling journal, will be tapped into most often.