Aquinas Academy Adventures: Our first week

Our first week back to our sit-down schoolwork was a little crazy. I was so very sick last week that I just didn't get the start that I had hoped for. But, it was a decent week, really. Here is what we accomplished:

J1 started his schoolwork, and we worked out a few kinks in his routine. We decided that doing human anatomy, American History *and* geography and map skills, in addition to all his other subjects, was just too much. We agreed that for the first half of the school year, he would focus on History and his unit on Human Anatomy. In the second half of the year, he will continue his history, but would study geography with the units on nutrition and survival skills that we had already planned. Human Anatomy is just so interesting, and fairly intense, so it is much better that he have more focus on that in this first part of the year. J1 also successfully got right back into math and handwriting, so I was quite pleased with that.

While I didn't manage to get started with the other kids last week, I did get all their binders completed! Here's a picture of the table with their master binders and their weekly binders while I was making up their lesson plans.

As you can see, I spent some time planning out our lessons, and now I have a good outline of what all of them should accomplish this year. I also spent a great deal of time thinking about how to organize my day so that I have the time to devote to teaching all of them.

I was a little afraid that I was spending way too much time planning, rather than just *doing*, but I really believe that isn't the case. I will give you more details in another post, but I will tell you that so far this week, all my planning is paying off and our lessons and routines are really going well!

Also, though we didn't do a whole lot of formal school last week, we did have a close encounter with the bug world! A Very Large Grasshopper got into our house one day. Thankfully, dad was home to help us take care of it. We watched it hop around our living for awhile - WOW can those things jump! Then we caught it in a cup and took it outside to study before we let it go.