Eye on the Ball, Please! Part 1

This is a bit of a planning post for this term, mainly to help me keep our focus for the new few months.  I realise that it is now near the end of January 2014, but a few of Tiger's classes have not settled until very recently so it is until now that I have a better idea of what our term will look like from now until the Easter holidays in mid April.  Over the next few days, I will be posting up the rest of our plan for this term.

Ball #1: Language Arts - Poetry and Shakespeare
Poetry
This term our focus for language arts is poetry.  This is driven primarily by the happy coincidence that both his drama teachers, without knowledge of what the other is doing, want to focus on poetry.  Tiger has two drama teachers -- one focusing primarily on literary analysis and acting skills, the other focusing on speech and recitation.  Since such a serendipity doesn't happen all the time, I shall take my cue from it and use our time at home to brush up on our poetry skills through our weekly poetry tea where we shall continue to bake and read to each other.  Nobody here will object to more tea and cakes!

I hope to add a little bit more meat to our weekly tea sessions by using the Arrow Poetry Guide, and to focus on two specific poems:

1. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
2. The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

Literature
Somehow this is turning out to be a rather Shakespearean term for us.  To begin with, his drama/literary analysis class will be doing five sessions of The Winter's Tale.

In addition, I found out about a MOOC looking at Shakespeare's Hamlet, which I am personally very interested to attend since I have not read Hamlet before.  I asked Tiger whether he would be interested to study this particular play with me and he said yes, so we are attending this MOOC together while working at our own levels.

Shortly after this course ends is the start of another Shakepearean course -- Shakespeare and His World, which Tiger and I will again attend together.


Grammar, Spelling, Writing
Handwriting will continue to be practised, because I think it is important to have beautiful handwriting. We will start with a review of print handwriting, followed by cursive handwriting.

Most of writing will be covered through our study in poetry and literature, as well as the monthly book club which has a creative writing component in addition to book discussion.

At home, we will change our strategy with regards to grammar study.  Instead of a touch-and-go approach to the different parts of speech, we will focus on just one or two aspects of it so that Tiger can have a good understanding of the different components of grammar.  As such, this term we will focus solely on studying nouns.

For spelling, we will resume where we had left off with All About Spelling level 2.



This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/21/14 
2. Entertaining and Educational - Hasty Pudding
3. Collage Friday: The Key to Successful Homeschool
4. Weekly Wrap-up: The One with the Love Languages, Too Much Castle, and New Curriculum
5. Homeschool Mother's Journal {January 25, 2014}