Halfway through 2nd Grade

Last week we finally crossed the halfway mark for our school year. We’ve had various reasons to be running later this year, and it isn’t too concerning as we school year round anyway, but it is just funny to be in February and only on week 19. We started this 6 weeks way back in the middle of December. 🙂 Current projections show us finishing mid-July. We are finished up through the European Renaissance and Ben is doing great while I’m enjoying re-reading all the fun books.

Bible readings come directly from the bible, working through Genesis and into Joshua. Weekly memorization and tagging along with Hannah’s readings keeps us in the word.

In history/social studies, our spines continue to be Child’s History of the World, Usborne Book of World History, and Window on the World. Once again I’ve been amazed at the wonderful amount of geography we are getting as we work through Geography Songs. We currently have half the world’s countries outlined on our map and Benjamin will at least know they are countries if he hears their names even if he can’t point them out in their location. It has been fun to recognize some of them in our time watching the Winter Olympics this year. We also read a book called Michelangelo studying the man of the same name.

Read Alouds have been lots of fun. We finished up The School Story, then read The Cricket in Times Square, The Apprentice, and Captain Nobody. We continue to have weekly selections from The Aesop for Children and Cornstalks: A Bushel of Poems.

Ben usually finishes his spelling assignments early in the week but he isn’t as interested in his creative writing topics as Hannah was. We have weekly Phonics C and Wordly Wise B lessons as well as one assignment in cursive and a creative writing. During this unit he has read The Chalk Box Kid, The Paint Brush Kid, The Littles, Third Grade Detectives #2, and Viking Adventure. He likes to read ahead on his readers so in between assignments he has been reading the Magic Treehouse series.

We have been managing to keep up with science but mostly because we’ve been a little laggy in the other subjects. We worked through a unit on birds with Usborne Book of Knowledge, then moved into earth science. We’ve read Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System, Planet Earth and Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth.

In math, Ben started with just doing drills as we were in between books. But he got bored with that so we moved on to Horizons 3. Sometimes we throw in some keyboarding as a break from math.

Benjamin leading the Ranger pledge at the awards ceremony!

Extras are always the best part of schooling. We have weekly piano, Royal Rangers, and park day. We went caroling with our church, did a service day with a local group called Mission Waco, and had a fun Bunco game night where the kids got their fall awards. Benjamin decided (we signed him up) to try playing basketball this season and he ended up really liking it. He wants to try again. We also went to a children’s production of “Into the Woods” as a field trip with our homeschool group and attended the opening day of the Ninja Turtle exhibit at the Mayborn Museum. We had Christmas morning at home followed by Diltz Christmas and Moehring Christmas. We spent some time at Tyler for New Years with the Diltz and Miller families. We’ve had some small rounds of colds that have affected some of our days of school, but so far have escaped from the flu and hope that trend continues. We’ve had visits from the Diltz and Moehring grandparents as well as celebrating our three February birthdays with a fun combined bash.