Weekly Report for February 10-14, 2014

We had three solid days of school this week. We had errands to run on Monday and they took almost all day.  N-boy was sick on Thursday so we missed our Art with Friend Valentine’s Day party and watched Carmen Sandiego, Liberty’s Kids, Wild Kratts, and Magic School Bus all day.  I was disappointed to miss out on those days, but so be it.

We didn’t do any Circle Time this week.  That’s what I’m most frustrated about.

We studied King James I in history this week.  The children did a fine job of understanding the political and religious issues in the chapter.  They also were reminded of our trip to Jamestown and the things we learned there in this chapter.  For science, they read a couple of chapters from The Mystery of the Periodic Table and learned about ancient elements and alchemists and how they began studies in elements.  They practiced geography blobbing and worked on learning about Wyoming, Nevada, and Utah (M-girl and N-boy) or Oklahoma, Texas, and reviewing the Southwest region (R-girl).

Latin, as a combined content area discipline, has been a success so far. We’ve chanted together, worked on helping each other with the assignments, and everyone passed their (independent) quiz on Friday.   I’m glad I decided to firm up foundations.

Everyone continued with math. R-girl is working on two digit addition.  She’s handling it very well.  M-girl is working on fractions and time. I love that MEP introduces fractions as words and as portions of hours.  For my verbal kiddo, this makes so much sense to her.  N-boy is still reviewing multiplication, but has gotten some fractions in there too.  They’ve continued with Calculadder.  N-boy is in Level 10, M-girl Level 9, and R-girl Level 4.  M-girl and N-boy worked on the Case of the Missing Medal in logic.  Apropos while the Olympics are on.

The children read the first three chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe this week for literature. We did copywork, narration, and dictation from their chapters for writing.  They’re working on writing everything in cursive with beautiful penmanship.  The older two also have their C.S. Lewis quotes to copy. R-girl continues practicing lower case letters and her full name.  I’ll be happy when I don’t have to remind them to write in cursive.  We also worked some more on lesson 2 in Writing and Rhetoric.  I really like what we do with our literature and assigned reading, but think we’re going to have to work a little faster on Writing and Rhetoric.  Need to think of some changes there.

For grammar, N-boy has finished the main work in First Language Lessons 3, and needs only to do the “extra” lessons like dictionary skills, letter writing, and oral usage.  I’m so proud of his hard work!  M-girl completed the first three Letter Writing lessons in Level 4 because I finally figured out I need to note in my book when to schedule those lessons mid year.  She also started back working on predicate adjectives and predicate nominatives.  R-girl is memorizing prepositions.  The benefit of being child #3 means she already has a good part of the list memorized.  R-girl finished lesson 10 in her Explode the Code book for spelling.

We had piano lessons and practices. The kids were excited because Mrs. Juliet had given us a list of repertoire books to order and they got to start them.  I’ve been hearing Minuet in G and the Peanuts theme song (Classical book and Jazz book) all week … and some new hymns.  Fun!  We had basketball practices and M-girl played her best game yet this morning.  Sadly, N-boy missed his game because he was still symptomatic.