We've finished four weeks of school. It feels wonderful to say that. We've had a good year, our subjects are flowing smoothly, and we made it four weeks with only one minor delay for lingering illness.
We are spending time with Tolkien this year. We're working through Literary Lessons from Lord of the Rings, which is a literature study. You can see the details at homescholar.org. So far we've finished five chapter of Lord of the Rings and finished the Tolkien biography by Humphrey Carpenter. We were both intrigued by the biography. As a yet unpublished writer, I found some great gems to hold onto, some details of a writer's life to work into my habits.
We're fans of Lord of the Rings, more in the movie sense at this point. We've watched the extended versions of all three movies. We have brought the Ring culture into our house with all the silly little asides from Ring lore. Z thinks someone should stand on the corner in a Gandalf costume holding a sign that bears YOU SHALL NOT PASS! I can't convince him that he'd have fun doing just that. In a way I'm glad we have the movies to refer back to, which isn't always the case when I read a book. I'm a visual person, we both are picturing the movie characters as I read. Yes, we are doing them as read-alouds, although he is joining in with the readings. We enjoy the sharing of moments, reading being one of them.
Although we are only five chapters into the books we've already referred back to the movies. Z and I are great movie critics (grin). Our observation so far is that Peter Jackson has condensed the movies, not changed them. I am excited to see where else our wanderings take us this year.
We've already touched on two very individual men, Tolkien and Leonardo daVinci. We studied daVinci's art and read a short biography on him as well. Z then wrote a report on da Vinci. Writing is one of the skills we are focusing on this year, so we walked through the report phases together. He did a wonderful job. He's also learning how to cite sources, which has me learning the new ways as well.
In math we spent the week working with prime factors. This required a lot of thought on his part, he did excellent. I stretched my brain this week as well. Yesterday he asked if you could actually hurt your brain by thinking too hard. This was in math class, of course, all of the the weird random comments come during math class.
Aside from that did I mention he is now taller than me? Just by a smidge, but he is. He turns fourteen next week. Next week is also our first week off break, planned to coincide with his birthday. Overall I am very impressed with how our year is proceeding. Our schedule is working wonderfully. We're only behind in one subject, logic, but that is because we're taking longer in each lesson and we skipped a few days when neither of us were feeling well.
I believe we are going to enjoy our journey this year, and for that I am most glad.
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