Around the beginning of the year I grew quite dissatisfied with how I was handling our memory work, so I decided to figure out a new system.  Previously we were going over most, if not all, of our Latin and memory work every day, and we were both finding this too time consuming and far too tedious.  I remembered reading about a Scripture memory system on the Simply Charlotte Mason site and I decided to adapt it for my purposes.

I decided not to do the monthly tabs at this point, because I didn’t think Emma would be able to retain anything that long without reviewing it more often than monthly.  We have  Daily, Odd, Even, and Monday - Friday sections.  Memory work and Latin are combined, and this system makes it really easy to figure out what we need to review on a given day.  Today, for example, we reviewed the following in each section:  Daily - Glory Be (in Latin and English), Prima Latina lesson 9 vocab, Where Go the Boats by Robert Louis Stevenson, Odd - Lesson 8 & 5 vocab, Thursday - the Sanctus (in Latin and English), Lesson 3 vocab and the alphabet.  The vocab for each Latin lesson is generally 5-7 words and we generally do Latin to English first, then English to Latin.  It seems like a lot when I type it out, but it only takes us about 15 minutes to go through.

Our copywork also goes in this box, with a tab for copywork to do, and finished copywork.  It is rather like Penny Gardner’s copywork jar (she used to have a description on her site, but I can’t find it anymore), but in a box instead.  Emma likes being able to pick what she copies each day, and I like not having to come up with something decent each morning.  I’m much happier with what she’s copying now, and I’m doing a better job at giving her good sentences that are the right length for her writing level.

Another thing we’re enjoying is our (rather grandly titled) Modern and Pratical Studies.  Each day we do some sort of different activity according to a theme.  Mondays are mapwork (think basic geography with wall maps - CA, US, and World), Tuesdays are dictionary work (I have her look up three words in her children’s dictionary and we discuss how to find them and the definitions), Wednesdays are money (we’re mainly working with coins right now - names, equilvancies, different ways to make the same amount), Thursdays are map skills (for example, looking at a zoo map or a fake town map and discussing how to find things, how to get places), and Friday is time (reading clocks, telling time).  Fairly basic stuff for the most part, but it is fun and it helps to do it in a systematic way like this.  We were doing most of these things here and there, but I was finding her retention was not particularly good when we weren’t making it a point to do it regularly and this helps me to remember to keep getting back to this stuff.

So there’s a partial picture at least of our homeschool work.  It is hard to believe this school year is soon going to be drawing to a close (and will we finish Math-U-See Alpha by then?  Right now it is a toss-up)  My goal is to be done by May 23rd - since I’m due the following week and all - but
maybe we’ll go just a bit longer.  Or who knows, the baby may come early and we’ll finish Alpha in August when we start up again!  Right now I’m thinking about starting on August 11th, but it looks like we’ll be moving at some point this summer (and no, not into our house *sigh*) so this date is definitely not set in stone.