Wednesday Fun Day

Today began in earnest our newest experiment.  Our new schedule includes Mondays and Tuesdays with "heavy work" like Math and English, a break on Wednesday for "light work" like unit studies, art, music, and back to the "Grindstone" for Thursday and Fridays.  So far, so good!  It has been nice to take a break from the other topics on Wednesdays and schedule "fun" stuff into our plan.

So today, we started our unit study on Beethoven.  The girls have been listening to his music all month and soaking it in as they just can not get enough.  Even Magnolia says in the car, "Mom, is this Beethoven? Can we listen to more Beethoven?"  Now in fairness, we have been listening to 2 wonderful cd's that are very kid-friendly.  Beethoven's Wig which is a hilarious symphony sing along with vocal and instrumental versions of the classical pieces.  And a Classical Kids cd about Beethoven's life set to his music called Beethoven Lives Upstairs which apparently also comes in a dvd and a book version.  Rose has been reading the book too.  It is fabulous and had them transfixed immediately!

So we worked on our Beethoven unit and that was when I realized Daisy did not know her continents when doing our map work to find out about Beethoven's home in Austria.  So after some quick maneuvering on my part, we added geography and continent study to our syllabus for today and the rest of the year.  (I had been planning on doing some continents and some countries every week, but after today, we are foregoing the countries to focus on continents for the rest of the year.  We will start again with countries in September once we have the continents down!)

We have been doing mapwork and geography with every history lesson, but since those are ancient maps, I figured we needed an overall world view of the current global geography in order to understand that Austria is NOT Australia and it is NOT located in North America!  LOL!  So we started our study of North America today and while it was difficult work for them, I can already sense it will get easier as they get used to it and I get bigger maps to work with ;),

We also started our study of the Latin parts of the Mass with an introduction to the Kyrie.  That was probably the hardest part of the day, but they were already fried from the map work at that point, so we listened, we translated, we tried to sing and out they went to build a fort while the sun was shining!