We survived weeks three through five of homeschooling!
We survived a few more weeks of homeschooling! This is how they went.
Oh man, the last three weeks have been a blur! I started writing this post back after the third week finished, and then updated it to say weeks three and four after the fourth week, and here the fifth week has slipped past now also! So this post is going to cover weeks 3-5 which is September 14, 2026 through October 2, 2026. We officially made it through the full first month of homeschooling!
We are definitely getting into a routine now, each weekend I spend a few hours planning the lessons for the upcoming week and then we go into the week! The night before each school day I review those lessons and see if there's any changes I want to make. During the week the school day for the kids usually starts around 9am when Ziqin does Chinese class with them. Then around 10am they switch over to their Beast Academy math curriculum while I'm available to help if they get stuck, and then we go into classes!
In week three we did another IEW writing lesson, but for weeks four and five we spent more time on grammar. For grammar, we first started with trying out https://grammarflip.com, but moved on to https://noredink.com which the kids seem to enjoy more and also seems to be more effective!
Let's take the updates by subject!
History
We wrapped up the early Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations back in week three and then Nikolai and Gisele spent time working on history reports covering the time period we had covered so far. They wanted to post them online, so this is Nikolai's and this is Gisele's!
That week we had planned to go to Luobi cave, which is a nearby neolithic (aka late stone age) archaeological site, but the rains came in hard and they closed the site for a few days! We did end up going in the fourth week though!
Before Luobi cave though we covered the Indus Valley civilization which is an interesting civilization that developed around the same time period as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and was far larger than both of them! It developed in what's now India and Pakistan, and had a writing system and sophisticated architecture, sewer systems, and more! They also seem to have been rather pacifistic, us having not found much evidence of weapons, this may have been what lead to their demise. We've never deciphered their writing system, so there is a lot we don't know about this giant civilization, including what happened to it!
Next we pivoted to spend some history time going back to the pre-civilization times and talking about Luobi cave and the people who lived there. It's the earliest evidence of human life here on the island of Hainan. We also spent a science lesson diving into how caves like Luobi form (it's a limestone cave), but more on that during the science breakdown!
Following Luobi cave we went back and did a review on ancient Egypt, the Mesopotamian civilizations (was never one unified one, Sumeria and Babylonian are probably the two best known civilizations from this time period), and Indus Valley. Then it was time to turn towards China where we'd start covering the earliest three dynasties: Xia, Shang, and Zhou. For these three we're taking the format that Ziqin does a lesson introducing the traditions and stories around each dynasty and then I do a lesson talking about what the historical and archeological evidence show. So in week five they got the intro to the Xia dynasty and then in week six the plan is for me to cover the historical evidence!
At the end of these early Chinese dynasties we'll have the kids do another history report to try and lock in that knowledge!
Math
There really isn't too much to cover with math, both kids continue to progress well through their curriculum! For math they each do their lessons solo, but simultaneously. We have goals for how much they get through each day rather than how long they spend on it, that helps us stay on schedule so we get to where we want to be by the end of the school year.
I think this is one place where the home schooling format really works well! In a regular school setting the whole class would need to move on so if one student needed more time it'd be difficult for the teacher to accommodate that.
Both kids have been doing great, acing all their tests so far! The Beast Academy curriculum gives them a test at the end of each chapter, Nikolai actually completed the Beast Academy curriculum and now will be moving on to the Art of Problem Solving Prealgebra course in week six!
Science
Week three was a lot of fun, we started in on Newton's Laws of Motion! As part of this we did some fun experiments with toy cars and ramps, and Nikolai even calculated the potential gravitation energy in joules of our toy car at a certain height! We had a lot of fun trying to predict how far the car would roll, and how much different surfaces (tile, paper, carpet) would affect the car.
Nikolai was very proud that he properly calculated 0.0159 X 9.8 X 0.117 by hand to get 0.01823094 joules of potential energy as well! Then, like history, before we visited Luobi cave we had a cave-related lesson where we dug into how limestone and limestone caves form due to the slight acidity of groundwater slowly dissolving the limestone over millions of years. In week 5 we moved into magnetism, and we also started a computer-hardware mini unit where we started learning how computers actually work!
We acquired a mechanical computer called a Turing Tumbler where we could see in action how switches and other mechanisms can be used to mechanically perform calculations the same way that computers do. The main difference is that in computers they use electrons flowing through transistors to handle all the logic, but the principals are the same.
We also dove into binary, why computers use binary, and how to do math with binary!
Oh, we also made a slight change to our science curriculum, Nikolai is teaching one of the classes each week! In our homeschool week 5 he taught his first lesson on static electricity, he had us rubbing balloons on hair and explained that the electrons transfer over creating a charge on the balloon gets negatively charged from the extra electrons and the hair gets positively charged from losing electrons.
Computer Science
Nikolai continued learning more programming, learning all about how loops work, which is how you get code to repeat itself for some finite or infinite number of times.
Here's the first program he wrote with loops:
Here it is in action:
He also used his new knowledge to make a math game where it will ask you random addition or subtraction problems (within 20) and keep going until you get at least five questions right!
His target user for that program was Gisele, so we put together a spot in our school platform where anyone can access his programs.
Writing & Grammar
So in week three we did another of the IEW videos, but then we took a break from that to spend a bit more time focusing on grammar! For grammar, we first tried GrammarFlip, but after trying it for a couple weeks I decided to look for another tool and found NoRedInk which is much more engaging and teaches the grammar much better, so we're sticking with that going forward!
In week 6 we'll resume the IEW curriculum as well. Of course the most important writing the kids did this period was actually the history reports I mentioned earlier! For those, I first had each kid make an outline that they then submitted to me for approval, I gave them some notes and we iterated until the outlines were good, then they started on the actual reports.
This was a large project! We ended up spending about six hours on it in one day, Gisele had to spend additional time on it the following week to finish all the artwork she wanted to do for hers (hers was more a storybook than a report).
Art
Of course Gisele has continued doing some online art classes! Here are some of her latest creations:
Chinese
The kids have also spent a lot of time learning more Chinese, they are officially working on YCT Level 2 now, their reading is improving and so is their speaking!
What else did we do?
We also had some fun outside of school! There was one day we wrapped up early on a Friday and the kids and I headed to the arcade.
The kids also continued doing ping pong and tennis!
The kids also spent some time playing in the facilities at our apartment complex in the evenings!
