Half a Hundred Acre Wood

Christian homeschooling integrating Classical and Charlotte Mason principles

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Our normal routine is shifting all askew for the next couple of weeks as we prepare for a performance in Cookeville, TN. In addition to our normal work, we’ve been finalizing the memorization of a few script lines along with several songs and a bit of choreography. (Of course, by “we,” I mean “they” because every time I try to “help” the boys with songs or lines, I’m not only corrected, I’m also laughed at. At least I am doing my part.)  By the way, the children in the above photo are some stellar friends of ours that are in a classical homeschool community in Cookeville.  If you are in the area (or within an hour or two drive), we would love for you to come to this play! I’ll be wrestling with Levi and Isaac in the audience during all four performances, so you’re bound to find us one way or another!

Now, for our week…

Levi (age 5) is working through his lessons a page or two at a time.  We spend about 30 minutes completing all of his lessons (that’s Saxon Math 1, penmanship/copywork, and All About Reading Level 1).  He works quickly and then spends the rest of the day coloring, looking through books, building Lego whatnots, and wreaking general havoc around our home.

There’s not much new on the David front, although I have to share how much he (and the other boys) adore their baby brother.

They shower him with so much love and attention. It makes my heart sing.

I caught all of them (less Isaac) playing with the math manipulatives set. At one point, they were assigning monetary values to their tangrams (or pattern blocks) and calculating the worth of their various patterned masterpieces. Some days, the boys will extend something they learned in a lesson and do math for an extra hour!

Stephen (age 11) is working on Homeschool in the Woods projects about the American Revolution. History is his forte. It’s not really work for him to read about all the different battles and other events/people and then piece these projects together (although, of course, it is work for him to do any writing associated with it).

Last week, he presented about the tax acts that led to the Boston Tea Party.  David enjoyed looking back through the pie book Stephen had made (from the American Revolution Time Travelers Study).
Really, the whole family benefits from Stephen’s love of history. Pictured below, the boys are playing a game called “Taxation Frustration,” where they caught a glimpse of the extra taxes imposed on the colonists while also seeing what money looked like in those days.

David kept lucking out as a British citizen, while Stephen kept drawing the American Colonist card. It was great math practice, too, as the game required them to make change in a different currency than what we use today. [This game is also part of the Homeschool in the Woods American Revolution study. Can I just say that the Pak family of Homeschool in the Woods comes up with the best games?]

We also enjoyed a few books this week. Instead of reading Paul Revere’s Ride out loud, we enjoyed listening to the free Librivox recording by “Jim Fish of the Texas Frontier” while flipping through the book.  For a direct link to the mp3, click here.  (Note:  While Longfollow’s account is an example of fine American poetry, it is not historically accurate. Note from The Paul Revere House website:  “Two lanterns had been hung briefly in the bell-tower of Christ Church [now called the Old North Church] in Boston, indicating that troops would row ‘by sea’ across the Charles River to Cambridge, rather than marching ‘by land’ out Boston Neck. Revere had arranged for these signals the previous weekend, as he was afraid that he might be prevented from leaving Boston [the lanterns were lit to alert Charlestown, not Revere].”  For more about Revere, read “Rewriting the Legend of Paul Revere.”

David read Sam the Minuteman out loud, which gave us a chance to talk about minute men (which came up later in another book we read). Stephen’s read-aloud was Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George?, which provides a glimpse at the British side during the American Revolution.
I read Mr. Revere and I aloud over the weekend. As I stumbled through reading the first few chapters, I wasn’t sure if this was a good book selection for us. The dialect of the horse was difficult (the book is written from a horse’s perspective, and the horse started out as a sophisticated British horse with a much larger vocabulary than mine). But… as we continued and became more enthralled with Revere’s life, it ended up a real page-turner for us! And it’s not just about Revere’s famous ride. It starts out before the Boston Tea Party and tells about Revere’s part in that event, as well as the various rides he made as a main messenger during that time period. Most of the book is historically accurate, even though it is historical fiction. I do believe that this book may make it on our family’s Favorites list!
To wrap up our week (which ends on Monday), we made a lunchmeat-and-cracker snack with stars and liberty bells and “toy soldiers” (gingerbread men) using Christmas cookie cutters.

I’m just glad the boys are so easy to impress!

In closing, I wanted to let you know that it’s your one-year sponsor-versary of Jose!

If you’ve ever used any of our affiliate links, please know that you have changed a life! Thank you so much for supporting Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood and providing Jose with opportunities he would not otherwise have. For more about the sponsorship our readers made possible a year ago, visit What you Made Possible.


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