The Vikings, sailors, and warriors from Scandinavia began invading and settling many parts of Europe in the 9th century. Around 1000 A.D. the Viking, Leif Eriksson, reached the shores of North America. -CCM Beta year
While our Classical Catholic Memory lesson for this week introduces the voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1492, we're reminded of the earlier encounters the Vikings had with "Vinland" almost 500 years earlier, in our history book (not affiliated with CCM), From Sea to Shining Sea: The story of America.
By the end of the first chapter we learned that the sailors of the Santa Maria (Pinta, and Nina) prayed the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) each evening, which happens to be our Latin memory work for the next few weeks. I just screened the film, Vikings; Journey to the New World, for my visual learners. This documentary covers the materials from our lessons almost exactly and will provide additional review.
For writing we've elected to continue with International Excellence in Writing at home using the U.S. History-Based Writing Lessons, Volume 1, which matched up very nicely this week with two source text on Christopher Columbus.
Finally, this week after leaving speech therapy feeling rather frustrated (again) with what feels to me like a lack of progress, and also learning that one of the Occupational Therapist (we waited all summer for a slot to see) is leaving next week, it's time for a change. It's nearly settled, and we've booked appointments with a new therapy center not far away from the first. This new center just underwent an expansion and has twice the number of therapist on staff than our original center. Still a bit nervous, I decided to take our assessments copies in person so I could see this place for myself. Everything about this place is so much bigger! Multiple OT rooms, with swings big enough for even my teenager (who still loves to swing), and a rock climbing wall! And they have aged group therapy sessions, something our previous speech therapist (who moved away this summer) wanted to organize for my oldest son, but could never get authorized. Not only do they have room for us, but they can get both kids in at almost the same time for both speech and OT on the same day! Currently, we're going to speech on Tuesday morning and OT on Wednesday, and it's taking up a lot of our school time. Being able to knock out all the sessions in one morning will solve our Wednesday morning time crunch and cut down travel expense. The waiting room is very large and has a kid sized table for my to preschoolers work at. For the past few weeks I've been using our wait time to work on coloring and preliminary handwriting skills, but it's been less than ideal with no decent place to sit, and often an over crowded noisy waiting area. Still I'm nervous because we'll have a whole new set of people to get to know and I always worry about how my oldest will take to the changes. I pray this is a good move to make and that I'm doing the right thing.
Another marvelous thing happened this week. The opening of Jeff Todd Way will easily cut at least 10 or 15 minutes off my travel time on speech and OT day. Richmond highway is always so crazy and often crowded, and now I can avoid it almost completely. After visiting the new therapy center yesterday, we decided to take the new road home and it was a magnificent wide open road through trees (no development what-so-ever) and was like a time warp. The kids couldn't believe how quickly we were able to get home. Lining the new road is a very wide walking and bike trail. Fantastic!
No comments:
Post a Comment