First Lessons

We are a month into our school year, and it is going well. While we are still not a "school every day" family, we have tried to fit in a Bible story and copywork nearly every day and lessons in reading, math, literature, and geography a few afternoons a week. We honestly haven't begun history yet. We have been enjoying a warm, sunny September instead. Even math was brought outside one day.

I believe Lucas is settling into the Charlotte Mason approach. His narrations of Bible stories and Aesop's fables are better each time. His copywork is improving, and he has even begun making some of his letters "fancy." The highlight of our first month, though, is picture study. The first week, he studied and then described to me the painting The Son of Man by Rene Magritte. He then painted his own version of it with watercolors. He loves painting, even giving "a painter artist" as his answer to "When I grow up I want to be..." on the first day of school, so it shouldn't surprise me that picture study is going so well.

His next picture study was Football Players by Henri Rousseau. I left him alone on the couch for a few minutes with the picture and told him to look at it and try to remember everything he could. He remembered nearly everything - more than I would have, I think! He was able to tell me about trees in the background, clouds in the sky, what color stripes the players were wearing, their mustaches, the orange leaves ("I think it's fall," he inferred), and even the white fence behind the players. I was so impressed and proud of him, which made him proud of himself, too. When I gave him the painting to look at one more time, he noticed right away that one thing he hadn't seen the first time were the cracks in the tree trunks.

He wondered if Rousseau had painted this all in one day. I told him I didn't know, but some artists do work quickly, and others work for a very long time on one piece. We looked up the painting, and though we didn't answer that exact question, we learned more about the artist, the painting (he was impressed by the size of it, almost as tall as him), and where we could go see the painting in person (that idea really excited him - I think a visit to an art museum is in our future). I'm just thrilled that he has found something to be passionate about that neither of us would have ever expected or thought to make a part of our lives if we weren't homeschooling.

I'm also pleased with his progress in reading. I have to constantly remind myself that boys only four months younger than him are just starting kindergarten, and to expect a full year's difference in reading level is not fair. Still, I believe he is reading fairly well, considering it is not something we worked on every day last year, or even this year. We have been reviewing CVC words and sight words, adding to those that we learned last year. We have also started working on th, sh, and ch, and briefly introduced silent e through the words five and nine. He seems to enjoy spelling words and using word cards to write stories more than actual reading, but he is getting more comfortable reading the short Bob books and the lessons in Alpha-Phonics.

You can see his "fancy" s in sat.

Nature study has been another high point. He has become quite a good cricket and grasshopper catcher. We haven't seen many birds, so I've allowed him to focus on insects and a few wildflowers still blooming. His first entry in his nature notebook is a drawing of goldenrod. We had walked through a field full of goldenrod, and there were bees all around. He was a little scared but we made it, and then he worked hard on his drawing for about 20 minutes.

Overall, our year is off to a good start. We are still picking up steam in terms of our daily routine and how many lessons we fit in each week. More importantly, though, we are enjoying our time together and I'm seeing sparks of joy in both of us that have been missing for a while.

He made the apple pie filling while I made the crust.