Weekly Report for July 29-August 2, 2013

Ah. There’s nothing like a full five day week of lessons to continue in the swing of things. We did Circle Time five days (I plan for four in a week). We accomplished all the work I had planned (well, as of this writing M-girl still has a chapter of Anne of Green Gables to read and narrate, but I’m giving her a short break).

I’ve mentioned a few times some changes I’m making to our Circle Time, that it wasn’t working. One of the things that was a problem was that we were doing almost all the reciting and then almost all of the reading. Instead, I spread things out a little. So we read from our devotional book right after we pray. We read from the manners book around the same time as catechism and so on. Changing activities up throughout Circle Time improved each activity and Circle Time as a whole. We’re no longer opening Circle Time with the Doxology or Gloria Patri. The children all know these, which was the goal of using them in the first place. We’re also reviewing less. Fewer catechism questions reviewed (M-girl and N-boy just review the next couple of pages, R-girl is reviewing one old page and the page she’s working on), one long passage of scripture at a time (we’re perpetually working on Gen 1 and another passage each day already). This has the advantages of me flipping back and forth less in my book, the children reciting all together, and no one waiting their turn to recite. Since they’re all so close in age and have worked on the same pieces, this worked well for us this week. I hope it continues to work well.

I made assignment sheets for the kiddos for the first time in a while and that worked pretty well too. They knew what was expected to be accomplished. They had all week to work on it, as long as it was done by the end of the week. This helped me work with them on working hard and finishing. I gave them enough work to have a light day on Friday. R-girl did a great job and was done by 11:30 today. The others had more to do, but I think if they see what can be done, it’ll be better.

This process is taking 2 hours, though. One of those hours I had for scheduled math and independent
work, but the other for content. I think I’m going to have to make adjustments. R-girl only did flash cards for math this week,

Ladybug Girl does math flash cards? Who knew?

and it was all I could do to get through N-boy’s Year 2 lesson and M-girl’s Year 3 lesson (which was mostly review!) We still have lots of dawdling.

Grammar went well, M-girl finished the Dictionary Skills lessons and started Oral Usage. N-boy reviewed and diagrammed the four kinds of sentence. R-girl started learning about Adjectives. Everyone read in their literature. N-boy read four chapters in The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon. M-girl read (or will have read) 5 chapters in Anne of Green Gables. R-girl finished Harry Kitten and Tucker Mouse. They also read from history and science books. They wrote narrations about their reading  Everyone completed a lesson in Latin.  They had all been amidst lessons for a long time, so clearing the slate to begin on Monday. 

We read the chapter from Story of the World about the Renaissance.  We read two chapters of science.  One was on Fossil Fuels and the other on Metamorphic rock.  We did two projects.  The first was to consider which kinds of rocks became metamorphic rock.  The second was comparing how heat, pressure, and time affected ice crystals in order to consider how these would affect rock.

Last weekend we had our annual review, M-girl and N-boy officially passed Second and First grade! We mailed our Notice of Intent on Wednesday and are all prepared for the next school year.