School

A friend of mine was checking out Prastis blog.  She's been posting about school with Emma each week.  My friend asked what I do with Ben.  I wont start posting weekly updates like Prasti does.  I think I've stole too many of her ideas already!  I wanted to give a small glimpse into our days.  
We started the school year heavy on the classical home schooling with a little bit of Charlotte Mason mixed in.  As the weeks have gone by, we've moved a little more towards Charlotte, but still have some classical education structure to our days.
3 days a week we work out of a writing handbook.  This is mostly copy work, but every now and then it has Ben plug in a few words or ideas into sentences already written out. It incorporates basic writing ideas like sentence structure and picking out the topic of a few sentences.  
2 days a week we work on grammar.  Ben is learning the difference between a sentence and a fragment, what is a question, exclamation, what are question words and descriptive words etc.
2 days a week we work out of a reading workbook.  This isn't typical reading though.  It has a lot of stories and famous paintings to help kids develop narration skills.  It also has poems to memorize and covers a lot of things Ben already knows like how to write his address, days of the week, the months, what we write upper case and what stays lower case.  Its a good review every now and then, but we don't spend too much time on things he already knows.  
2 days a week we do spelling.  This is the one subject that is pretty stress free.  Ben happens to be a great speller! While he isn't perfect, he is easily spelling words from the second grade word lists I've found on the Lakewood education website.
We do math everyday.  Right now Ben is learning the ones, tens and hundreds place values.  So far Ben has done well in math, but his lack of focus and rushing through with out reading directions cause a lot of errors and stress.
We do music everyday. We are on Beethoven right now. We spend a week or two listening to the same symphony. We listen to the music four days a week. Its on in the back ground during school and randomly through out the day.  On the 5th day, we talk about the composer and learn a few facts about his/her life.  We spend about a month on each composer.
We do science twice a week.  We just finished the human body.  Ben really enjoyed the body book we used.  We went through the major organs and learned what each does.  We talked about our teeth, tongue, skin, bones, blood and Ben asked a lot of questions about the heart. We might have a future cardiologist on our hands!  We are on animals right now.  We discuss a different animal each week, learning some basic info about each.  Ben either draws his version of them or does a coloring sheet.  I'm sure we'll end up at the zoo once or twice to check out the animals we're learning about.
We do history twice a week.  We've recently switched our history curriculum.  We had been reading Fifty Famous Stories as extra reading, but have made that, along with An Island Story our history.  After we read the story, Ben practices his oral narrations.  We also look up the locations we discussed on a map.  When we read about battles, we'll trace the path on the map, look at who is around and how far they were from America.  We also started reading about Benjamin Franklin to incorporate some American history.  Of course, Ben thinks its awesome they have the same name so I think that has helped on keeping the focus!
We do Geography once a week.  We started reading Paddle To The Sea which is about a boy in Canada who sends a home made canoe on an adventure that includes the Great Lakes.  Ben thinks its cool someone wrote a book about the lake we live near.
We do art three times a week.  Twice a week, we look at paintings by what ever artist we are studying.  We are on Michelangelo right now.  We learn a little about the artist, compare paintings and compare to other artists we've studied.  Depending on the artist, we spend 2-4 weeks on each.  On the third day, we try to do something fun.  I'm not very creative so it usually involves Ben coloring a picture or drawing his own version of something we are studying.  Pinterest has given me some ideas so I hope to get a bit more crafty on our art projects.  
Ben is also learning French.  We started learning some basic words last year.  This year we are working on starting conversations.  Ben can say things like, hi, how are you, I am fine, and you, please, thank you, the alphabet and lots of random filler words. 
Nature study.  This is new to our curriculum.  We will be doing this once a week.  We find a lot of bugs, birds etc around here so I'm going to have Ben start identifying some of them and we'll see where this takes us.
We do a lot of reading.  We have been pretty much following the Charlotte Mason reading schedule.  Ben reads a lot of poems, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Bible stories etc.  Some of it is over his head, but he's picked up some new words and more is sinking in each week.  
I think that covers it.  It sounds like a lot, but we are usually done in 1-2 hours depending on the length of stories and how interested Ben is in the subject.  That doesn't include the reading that Ben does through out the day and the extra day to day (handicrafts) we are working on.  We are working on actually making his bed, not just moving the comforter around a little bit. Ben helps with getting lunch together, putting away clothes and dishes.  He helps a lot with the babies, moving the bumbos, getting diapers or socks, refilling water bottles.  He sets the table, does some cleaning and make sure no one kills themselves or each other when I leave the room.  
Its taken a while to find our groove, but I think we're in a good groove right now and when its working, its really good.