3rd Quarter Wrap-up 2020: Together
In July and August, we remained in Virginia with my husbands’ job. Unfortunately, because most things were still shut down, or restricted we did not take any field trips this quarter. However, at the end of June we made a quick visit to Indiana to see both of my parents. We made it back to Virginia for the Fourth of July and spent the day with some of my family. The girls enjoyed swimming and having a crab and shrimp feast while there, and later got to play with sparklers and watch a few fireworks. We continued a normal school routine until the week before Labor Day Weekend. That week we moved in our camper back to Maryland, in the same campground we had left in March. We spent a week there with Daddy-o and the girls got to explore the woods, play at the park, and go swimming in the pool a few times as well. The first week of September, Daddy-o stayed in Maryland and the girls and I traveled back to Indiana to help with my Dad during his back surgery and some of his recovery. The last week of September we will be traveling back home to Wisconsin, to settle some of our things into the New Home Base House we bought, and for me to have a doctor’s appointment to check on Baby-L in early October.
We moved away from our together Read Aloud coming from Thumper’s Sonlight Core A list, and I began picking from my own list of books, I have wanted the girls to experience. We began at the end of last quarter with “The Summer of the Monkey’s” and finished it at the beginning of August. Even though I knew the book from my own childhood, I almost was not able to finish reading it aloud, which I am going to blame on pregnancy hormones. They then listened to “George’s Marvelous Medicine”, by Roald Dahl and then we finished “The Magician’s Elephant” by Kate DiCamillo right before heading to Indiana.
We continued our geography study of the United States by studying New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, and we finished until with North Carolina, until we return to our home base in November. The girls have gotten really well at being able to identify and locate the states we have studied so far this year on the map, and are starting to be able to identify, as well, the bordering states when we begin a new state.
In science, before we left for Indiana, at the beginning of September, we finished our Science study of the Properties of Atoms and Molecules, with Answer’s in Genesis: God’s Design for Science. During this quarter we studied Bonding, Chemical Reactions, Chemical Analysis, Acids, Bases and Salts, Biochemistry and finally Applications of Chemistry. The girls were able to enjoy this study more as they were able to see how these things all occur in their daily life. The liked applying the knowledge they were getting in the everyday world. We will finish out this year studying a bit of Ecology, starting in October.
July and August allowed us to keep up, for the most part with our Supplemental Saturdays.
In art we studied Leonardo DaVinci and his drawing for inventions. The girls took on watercolor painting, painting on aluminum foil, drawing a picture from a random line, making picture frames for Daddy-o for Father’s Day and then making some thank you cards for gifts we received from some of Daddy’s Work friends.
In music we studied Folklore songs and began basic music reading in preparation to begin playing recorders in November. We moved on within Lesson 2 for our ASL studies and have been learning and applying vocabulary by doing lots of review this quarter, as the vocabulary has been much harder to work on this quarter. With everything going on and traveling, and the need to pack lighter, we opted out of these extras for September, and probably wont pick them up again until November.
We will spend the first week of next quarter in Wisconsin, and then travel back to Indiana to help with my Dad again until his follow-up appointment in mid-October. The girls and I should be back in Wisconsin at the end of October and then remain their and start preparing for Baby-L’s arrival in December. We will take November to finish up our Sonlight Curriculum and begin again our Supplemental Saturdays.