Weekly Report for February 24-28, 2014

Yes. Yes it is Monday evening and I’m just now getting to last week’s Weekly Report. We have been busy all weekend with basketball and prepping for the snowmageddon which didn’t happen and I just never quite got far enough to get this done.  Last week, we had our best week of school, hands down, in a long time. No extra interruptions. Five complete days. Everything got done with minimal complaint and general compliance.  Some days were harder than others, but overall I thought we had a great week.

Part of this success included four days of Circle Time that went quite well.  We started reading Mathematicians are People Too, which my brother gave me for my birthday (loving it).  We’re also still enjoying Peril and Peace, last week we read about the Bible and how it was compiled.  We continued working on ‘O Worship the King’ as our current hymn.  We read a passage from Pippi Longstocking in Everyday Graces.  It just seemed like it all worked pretty well.

For math, everyone completed 5 lessons.  M-girl is working on fractions and three digit numbers up to 1000.  N-boy is working on order of operations and reviewing two digit numbers.  R-girl is starting to learn about 2-digit numbers adding and subtracting across whole tens.  They are also working on Calculadder: Level 11, Level 12, and Level 6 (in order of age).

How many three digit numbers can you make with three numbers?

In history we studied Henry Hudson and Samuel Champlain both of whom explored North America in an attempt to find a Northwest Passage to Asia.  We read and did the map work from Story of the World.  In science,  the children read 2 chapters of Mystery of the Periodic Table.  The older two are enjoying it, but R-girl is struggling with it.  M-girl and N-boy solved the Mystery of the Missing Mascot in their logic assignment. Geography continued with working through States and Capitols and Blobbing.

Blobbing, blobbing.  Not too bad.

Literature has continued with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Everyone kept begging for more than one chapter a day.  They wrote and narrated and copied and did dictation from their chapters.  They have loved the book (which they have all listened to or read before), we should finish it this week; next week I hope to do some “enrichment projects.” Pray for me, that’s not my thing.   The kids have continued working on the C S Lewis copywork I found for them for penmanship; R-girl started that this week.  I copy them out for her first in cursive, though. 

Writing.

We also worked some more on lesson 2 of Writing and Rhetoric on Friday.  I’m thinking about some coming changes to writing in the coming weeks, though.  Still mulling.  R-girl needs quite a bit of help with scribing, and the summarization was surprisingly difficult for them, but we’ll keep practicing.

Grammar is still going quite well.  R-girl is getting close to the end of Level 2 and memorizing prepositions. N-boy worked on the letter writing lessons at the end of Level 3.  M-girl is working on diagramming questions.  We worked on Chapter 3 of Latin for Children.  The review and chanting is going pretty well.  R-girl is learning and understanding pretty well, but obviously needs more help than the others.

Typing, Piano, and Art went well.  We learned some about Rembrandt and made prints.  For our Artist and Composer Studies, we finished the Monet packet from Simply Charlotte Mason (loved it!) and read more of the Bach book.

Basketball Season was great.  We had final games on Saturday; in the community surrounding our town the final day of the season was a Big Deal.  R-girl’s team played their first (and only) game, which they won.  R-girl played some really good defense. M-girl’s team played their best game of the season, but unfortunately still lost.  N-boy’s team won their last game.  We were so thankful to have had this gymnastic, physical activity this winter … even though it made our January and February very busy.  We now have a couple of weeks until soccer season.  Someone here can’t wait for baseball, though.