Friday, May 27, 2016

End of the School Year

We ended our school year here at Redstone Academy earlier this week.

Redstone Academy


We finished two more Magic Tree House books recently.

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We have been going in order, and with each book we do a little unit study to go along with the topic.

So far, we have covered dinosaurs, knights and medieval castles, mummies and ancient Egypt, pirates, ninjas, the Amazon rain forest, prehistoric mammals, the Moon and outer space, Dolphins, cowboys and the old west, lions and the African Savannah, Polar Bears and the Arctic, Pompeii, the Great Wall of China and ancient China, Vikings, the Olympics and ancient Greece, and the sinking of the Titanic.
 
Here are some (photographic) notes (mostly for myself) about some of the curriculum that we completed this year, and my plans for next year:

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Lex completed 1st grade Science, Math and Phonics.  He completed 2nd grade Geography.  Next year I'm going to order 2nd grade Science and Math, and 3rd grade Phonics and Geography for him.

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Connor completed 3rd grade Science, Phonics, Daily Paragraph Editing, Writing, Academic Vocabulary and Language Review.  I don't think we are going to do all of these again next year for him, since we are going to begin a different English curriculum next year for both boys.  He'll definitely do 4th grade Science.

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Connor also completed 4th grade Georgraphy.  He'll do 5th grade in that subject next year.  He's not quite done with these 4th grade common core math books, so we will work on them again next year, along with his Life of Fred books.  The Word Problems book is better than the Math Practice book, so we might just go with that version for both the boys from now on.

This summer we are going to focus on handwriting for both boys.  We are going to review printing, and Lex is going to learn cursive.  We are also going to review the Greek alphabet before we start our next Greek book in the fall.

Lex completed two-thirds of this book already, and both the boys are going to finish it this summer.  Connor is already done with his cursive book, and I'm going to get the same one for Lex.

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This Spelling program wasn't very useful or fun, but Connor managed to work through two-thirds of this book this year despite its shortcomings.  I'm just going to use the last 10 spelling lists this summer as words for handwriting practice.

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My goal is to focus on handwriting this summer, but to keep it easy and fun.  Hopefully by the fall, their handwriting will be clearer and more effortless, and then we won't have to worry about it any more.  A gal can dream, right?  Boys can have beautiful handwriting, right?

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