Wrapping up 4th/6th Grades

These super short pencils we have left (and their even shorter erasers) tell the truth - we have worked hard and we are finally at the school year's end!  Hooray!  Anna's 4th grade year and Noah's 6th grade year were great!

 

I have only to report grades and attendance now and to crank out this school year wrap-up post before I can mentally check out for the summer.  Ha!  So here's that!  

First, our main curriculum this year - our third year using GeoMatters: Trail Guide to Learning.  This year's path was Paths of Progress and it covered the part of American history involving inventions and progress in science, technology, and industry.  I thought these topics would kill me, but honestly, this was my favorite year yet.  Who knew?!  Anna said the same.  And Noah was naturally into it.  We followed the 6th grade level work for both kids - middle school stuff!  We will continue with Trail Guide in the fall with the last year's path - Journeys into the Ancient World.

Full year's worth of student notebook pages for each kid.

This year's science topics included simple machines, forces, work, the systems of the human body, and related agricultural and engineering topics that went with all our inventors, pictured below.  Y'all, we are at a learning level that has me learning all this along with them.  It's such neat stuff!

All the inventors we studied this year. So many!

We kept right on trucking with our beloved and so impressive RightStart Math.  This year Noah's math had him reading the lessons for himself.  That was a real challenge for him and his language impairment.  I would say he made it through a full lesson himself about half the time? The other half I would have to intervene or assist or yell and shout in frustration.  But the kid learned SO MUCH.  Like, SO STINKING MUCH.  And like, really hard MUCH.  He is doing stuff I didn't do til high school.  So he gets credit for that in my book.  And he finished the year with an 85 on his cumulative test, and we all know what beasts cumulative assessment can be.  Ouch!  Proud of him!  Anna breezed through her year, finishing early in April.  So I gave her a week off math to celebrate and then started her in next year's level to finish the year. 

Along the way, I supplemented with some deductive thinking/logic puzzles and Fix-It Grammar drills for Morning Work, 

and our own vocabulary practices from words we'd come across all year, along with an online vocabulary program I adore that builds from greek and latin roots and words parts entirely, WordBuild.

We finished a second year of IEW for formal writing lessons using the Continuation Course.  Can't rave about Pudewa and this writing program enough!  We'd do about two lessons/videos a month.  Anna is a natural writer and Noah has simply blossomed in his writing skills with this program.  All the props to IEW.  We will continue this course next year, possibly moving slower and testing our writing wings without the intensive lessons as often.

And for Bible we completed Our 24 Family Ways from Clay Clarkson.  I highly recommend this guide!  I would sell you mine now that we are done, but Josh and I wanna keep it to do with Lasa.  I love how each way was organized among main themes:  authorities, relationships, possessions, work, attitudes, choices.   I wish I had had this resource several years ago for Noah and Anna honestly.  We had SUCH great talks about these disciplines and their scriptural instruction and applications.

And that's that - 2018/2019 school year is a wrap!  We had our last day of school breakfast out with milkshakes and we will not be looking back!

I can't believe I have been homeschooling for SIX years now! Anyway, I offer only a quick pic of a few things the kids will do all summer for morning work along with lots of reading.  Other than these, our brains will vegetate.  See ya in the fall, school stuff!