Well, I guess I need a little catching up! (What else is new?)
Let's begin with the most important announcement:
William has finished All About Reading:
But even more importantly, he is now reading FOR FUN! This means all five of my boys are reading for fun now. This is the milestone I dreamed about all those years ago when I was crying onto my laptop all those years ago before Maxwell was reading fluently. https://lindyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2015/04/bad-bad-dyslexic-day.html
As I've struggled I've had to rely on success stories from others, fiercely determined that we would have a success story of our own, but with a pit in the core of my being, worrying that I was not enough. I know others need this too. I think that's why my most popular blog is this one: https://lindyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2020/01/52-famous-dyslexic-people.html
Which highlights 52 famous dyslexic people. It has over 9,000 views. That's how much people need hope. (By the way, my blog has over 160,000 views! I was applying for my grad program, and I put in 8,000 because I was accidentally looking at my science blog, not this one. Well, if they fact check me, they will be pleasantly surprised. I got more that 8,000 on one post!)
William is my most severely dyslexic boy. He's the only one who needed Foundation in Sounds (although, in looking back, Hyrum should have done the vowels part of that curriculum.) That's why Abraham was reading before William was, but now, reading is part of William's identity.
The last lesson in All About Reading asks this question:
Now we are solely focusing on All About Spelling. I tried to do them at the same time, but it was just too much, so I put spelling on the back burner until we were done with the reading books, and now he is flying through spelling.
I noticed that William was not confusing his "B"s and "D's at all, and I asked him how he was doing that (thinking maybe it was one of the strategies I had taught him...NOPE) He showed me how he thought about the capital "B" when doing the lowercase "b." If he could change the lowercase "b" into an uppercase "B", then it was correct, but if not, it was wrong.
Abraham has been moving right along in English. Without me knowing it, he wrote a letter to Santa and put it in "Santa's Mailbox" next door, and our super kind neighbour even wrote him back!
I have started going through how to write an essay with Daniel. We used a Brainpop movie in helping describe how to do this. I bought Brainpop this year, and I don't regret it one bit. I love Brainpop!
Hyrum...have I mentioned that Hyrum has done all the English he will EVER have to do in University? DONE! Yes, done with ALL English, EVER! But he is still learning a lot about grammar as he is obsessed with Spanish right now. He's done a year of Duo Lingo.
Hyrum did a little bit of self-handicapping the other week. He had a mid-term in his University Psychology class, and he wouldn't let me help him study. In fact, he didn't study at all. I recognized this from my psychology classes that I have taken. It was self-handicapping, so he could blame getting a bad grade on not studying instead of his intelligence.
He said he didn't want my help because if he got a bad grade on the test, I would be upset, but he got a bad mark anyway, and I didn't freak out, and I told him that he's seen how I don't freak out when he gets bad grades, so he better let me help him in the future. He is still getting a "B" in the class, but it's a very low "B" so I've got to push him a bit.
Hyrum has been doing okay with his classes this semester. He got an "A" in Programming with Data Structures, which was only a 9 week class. Now he is doing C Language, and thinks it's okay to turn everything in late because he says his professor doesn't mind, and it's driving me CRAZY!
He is currently getting an A- in Computer systems which is a pretty cool class that does both software AND hardware. We got a package full of hardware for him to work on, which makes me so happy we were in the states when he started class, so it was easily mailed to us. I can't imagine how he could take this class if we were in Vanuatu or Madagascar!
As for math, William is doing excellent with his Video Text classes:
And Abraham is doing good with Rightstart Geometry.
For history, I think I left off talking about how we learned about to Ottoman Empire. So the next thing we learned about was Joan of Arc. We read my beautiful book I have about her.
Then we learned about the Black death. We dressed up as black death doctors for this. I couldn't help but think about the last time we talked about this subject: during the COVID pandemic!
We talked about the "Four Humours" as part of this, and my boys really loved learning about it. In fact, Abraham insisted on changing his Halloween costume to the Black Death even though he had a different awesome store bought costume.
I think it's important to talk about the Fire of London, because it talks about the shift in culture that happened at that time with going from thatched houses to brick and the change in cleanliness and the change in peasants life after the plague.
We talked then about the Spanish Inquisition, and I had then do stained glass windows as our activity. Abraham was really into centipedes at the time, so he made stain-glass windows of centipedes...creepy.
We learned about the most important invention in history: The Guttenburg printing press. We tried to make our own printing press with moveable type, but it's harder than you think!
Then we moved onto Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. We watched this amazing documentary (that....admittedly is very dry) about the writing of the English Bible.
Then we learned about the Artists of the Renaissance. I did not spend as much time on this as any self-respecting art historian should have...but....oh well. We focused mostly on Leonardo di Vinci.
Then we learned about Henry the 8th and Elizabeth the 1st. We had already been learning about them because they have so much to do with the Reformation and Counter Reformation, but we focused on them even more and I made them watch my video I made years ago (in preparation for our visit to England) I made them watch it a few times until they knew it by heart. My mom is English, my children need to know about the Tudors!
And then we learned about Shakespeare. Shakespeare is NOT child friendly! We watched all the "Cliff notes" YouTube videos of Shakespeare, and I asked my boys which play we should study. They liked the blood and witches of Macbeth, but the magic and fun of Midsummer's Night's Dream. We watched the movie trailers for each of those plays, and the PREVIEWS were not child friendly, never mind the actual movie!
My boys LOVE the movie "Roseline" which is about the girl Romeo dumped when he met Juliette. So they felt they had heard Romeo and Juliette way too much (that's the play they watched in England a few years ago.)
I finally decided on "Much Ado About Nothing. We read this Awesome book that makes it child friendly and the illustrations remind me of Ronald Dahl.
I then "cleaned" up the movie, and we watched it while I stopped and paused it for discussion. They ended up loving it!
We also made puppets as an activity for learning about Shakespeare.
Now we learned about the Enlightenment. IT IS SO IMPORTANT! We are still living off the philosophies of the Enlightenment, and I thinks its very important that we learn what it is and what we stand for.
We focused mostly on Locke because he is of course so important. I found these awesome YouTube videos about him for kids:
We also talked about Voltaire, Copernicus, and Newton. Out of the three, we talked most about Newton. We even measured our weight and talked about the difference in gravity on earth vs the moon and figured out how much we would weigh on the moon.
An Abraham made this comic strip where this guy is flying around, but then Newton invents gravity, so he falls to the earth.
My boys went to the Fiddler on the Roof play, which is an excellent history lesson.
And my older boys went to a regency dance with their cousins. They were super cute, and I tried to make my dashing boys look like Mr. Darcy!
Also, I never finished sharing all the photos of when Hyrum and Daniel went on their church history tour. They went to all the original sites, and I will be forever grateful to the Barries for that experience!
And as far as social studies goes, we also went to the Remembrance Day ceremony.
And we also went to Community Awareness Day
AND our whole family has been learning the Provinces and capitols of Canada, and so far, Daniel has them down the best:
I finally started my science club, and we had an introduction to biology by learning about what makes something alive, and by talking about natural selection. We had a game where there was red chips and tan chips, and the kids ate 2 red chips and 1 tan chip (because the red ones didn't have camouflage) and pretty soon, all that was left was tan chips!
Then we learned about the inner working of cells. We made some cells from candy as we went over all the functions of each part. Yummy cells!
William even made a "cancer cell"
Also, when we were in Utah, Abraham and William went with us to Hot Springs, which is a hands on science activity for sure!
In other news, those two little men also went through the new Deseret Peak temple's open house
We've been doing Art with Janette, but not much since she's had health issues and we've been gone, and on his own, Abraham made this Axolotl (he's been obsessed with axolotls lately.)
And we've been doing Art with Grandma McKay!!! Grandpa has cancer of the lungs, so we went to Victoria to spend to month of October near him. It's been a rollercoaster. First we were told he had a few months to live, then the palliative doctor said weeks, then he went in for a biopsy (after a healing blessing) and they said his tissues looked perfectly healthy. Then the results confirmed cancer and it went back to having a few months to live.
Not fun
But it was amazing to spend time with them, and Grandma McKay had us all painting on Book of Mormons for the missionaries in Madagascar where Auntie Denna is the mission president.
We loved spending time with Grandpa, who, when he was awake, was able to joke and reminisce. I'll never forget when he went in for his biopsy. We were worried about him going under and there was a chance he would not wake up. He knew this, and made a "one last joke" on us by making it look like there was a body in his bed back at home. It cracked everyone up! That is who he is: a laugh until the end.
We had Thanksgiving as a big extended family, which was absolutely memorable.
We also had Halloween there. The kids made their own costumes to be "Lion King" characters.
And of course, it's Christmas season now:
I saw this sign (I can't even remember where now) about how if you put in a little more effort every day, over one year, it will culminate into an amazing amount.
Some of my kids were not born with all their adult teeth and need implants, and Hyrum got two from his AMAZING cousin while we were on the coast. Dustin said the procedure was like a video game because it relied so heavily on technology to bypass nerves and get the implants just right.
This is a major step in getting Hyrum ready for his mission. He will leave even before Maxwell comes home! My babies are growing up and leaving me!
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