Ben moved into 5th grade without too much trouble. It might have helped that we didn’t start science right away as I wanted to finish up the unit I was having Hannah and Benjamin do together for the ‘summer’. I really like this core, it is Eastern Hemisphere and the stories are a lot of fun.
For morning devotions we are continuing by helping Hannah finish her reading plan for Girl’s. We are in Psalms now (halfway!). We all have bible/prayer journals. Then Benjamin has an assigned reading for school and memory work. We’ve been working on Psalm 91 for this whole first unit, we’ll be finished soon. Our bible studies book this unit was Case for a Creator for Kids.
Our spines for history/social studies is Journey to the Eastern Hemisphere and 100 Gateway Cities. The eastern hemisphere book comes with a set of notebooking pages – timelines, maps, info sheets for him to fill out after we read about a country. And he has a “project” for each country. We began the year with a study of China (Ben even did a little calligraphy) and have started North Korea. We also do a weekly current event activity with our World Kids subscription. We read God’s Adventurer: Hudson Taylor as a supplement to our China study.
This unit we read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze. Our poetry book this year is a little different, but I like it. It is called All the Small Poems.
Reading / LA is really just a continuation of what we have been doing but a level up. I like most of our workbooks and so haven’t seen a need to change. He does spelling in Sequential Spelling 2 (we’ll be finishing that soon and moving into book 3), a cursive assignment (usually his memory verse), grammar in Keys to Good Language 5, and vocabulary in Wordly Wise 3000, Book 5. He has a weekly creative assignment or report.
Ben is reading all his readers to himself these days which is nice since the littles are both in the ‘learning to read’ stage. I can’t stay ahead of him and Hannah so I ask him the comprehension questions and then after he has finished I read the book too. 🙂 The books he read this unit were Li Lun, Lad of Courage, Mission to Cathay, Sweet and Sour Tales from China, The Year of the Dog, and The Kite Fighters.
We just started science a couple weeks ago. We are doing “health, medicine, and anatomy”. I think Ben will be able to ‘catch up’ in a few weeks as he mostly knows the stuff he is reading right now already. We use The Usborne Complete Book of the Human Body and Blood and Guts as our spines right now.
Left: Benjamin helping distribute food at the McGregor food pantry.
We had a few lessons of Horizons 4 left to finish up and then we moved straight into Horizons 5. Ben does pretty well in math.
Extras are a little subdued since some places aren’t open for what we would normally be doing. Hannah played volleyball but the place Ben usually plays basketball and the YMCA are still closed for the fall so Ben hasn’t had a sport to do. He still does a little bit of harmonica practice, duolingo for Spanish, and Prodigy for math supplement. We have been busy with our new church and business in McGregor and Benjamin enjoys helping the ‘customers’ get the games set up. He tries pretty hard to get his schoolwork done at home so he doesn’t miss out on game time later. Rangers started back up a few weeks ago and Benjamin finished a compass (orienteering) merit.
All in all, 5th grade is going well.