Adding Geography to Our Line-Up

               We took a fairly long break for the holidays.  Seneca’s cousins were off of school, so she spent a lot of time with them.  Her big sister was also home from college, and they spent some extra time together with big sis even taking her out to lunch one day.  

                After the holidays, Seneca continued our American history theme by reading a biography of Sacagawea.  From this book, I chose out some passages for copywork and dictation.  We don’t do dictation on a regular basis, but I’m trying to include it more.   

                I write out multiplication for problems for Seneca to work on. The goal is to do a page each day, but that never does seem to happen. However, we have been on a pretty good roll lately. 

                Seneca also worked on a new poem, “My Heart Is in the Highlands” by Robert Burns.  After doing a reading each day, she copied a verse from the poem in cursive into her notebook.  The poem is four verses, so this was spread out over four days.  I also found an audio on YouTube of Prince Charles reading this poem, so that was a nice touch for her to enjoy.  She also listened to the poem set to music.

                Seneca’s older brother participated in a volunteer day at one of our local nature preserves. While he was working, we took the opportunity to go walking through the trails.  It was more of a physical education experience than nature study, but even just spending time in nature can be so beneficial – and we had a great time.

               I was looking over the subjects and reading lists at Ambleside Online which we use for some suggestions.   I realized that we hadn’t done much with geography lately. I looked at Ambleside’s book suggestion for this year and I didn’t find it very appealing. The book is online as it is in the public domain, but it just didn’t seem to have the information that I would have liked to see. So, I did a YouTube search and found a great intro to geography concepts video. Seneca has already learned the seven continents, directions, use of a compass, and done some map work.  The list of things to work on this year as suggested by Ambleside are landforms, bodies of water, island, peninsula, etc.  I like the idea of working on these concepts; I just didn’t like the book.  Anyhow, I found a great video and Seneca has been watching and even re-watching it.  For writing practice, I’m having Seneca write the names of the continents in cursive in alphabetical order.  This is the geography video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqKTJtK_vw