Weekly Report for October 15-19 and 22-26, 2012

This report is for two weeks.  I didn’t do my report last week on Friday because we were at Leed’s Farm all day and then soccer all day Saturday and then I procrastinated until today.  We had a very good week this week.  Beautiful weather encouraged quick lessons.  We’re down to 8 days of school before our Yuletide Session! I’d better get to planning. 

Phonics:

R-girl: has only 10 lessons to go! We should finish next week! Woo-hoo!

Assigned Reading:

M-girl: has been working slowly on Grammar-Land.  I may have her finish this even into Yuletide Session just to be done already.

N-boy: is reading a book about Squanto that he’s enjoying.

R-girl: is working on The Cricket in Time’s Square.  Slowly.  Fighting all the way.  We’ll get there.

Math:

M-girl: is almost done with the measuring and spatial awareness section.  This is not her strong section, but she’s faced it like a trooper.  I think we work on multiplication next.  I would like to do some math over break, we’ll see how that works out.

N-boy: is working on making whole 10s. 

R-girl:has been working on that geometry, time, capacity section in year 1.  She’s very good with spatial awareness, so it is interesting to see how easily she goes through this section.  It is good that our children have different abilities.

Logic:

M-girl: is pretty much done with Critical Thinking Activities K-3. She has one page left to “make her own patterns.” 

N-boy: is hot on her heels.  He’s maybe a month away from finishing this.  There is a point where it is just too hard for him, but once we work slowly and carefully, the frustration leaves and he is more than capable.

R-girl: has started this and, not shockingly, is rocking the house at the Imagery sections.  She has a harder time with Patterns and Logic, but is getting better.

Grammar:

M-girl: is working on prepositions.  Boy, having learned them in FLL2 (and had a refresher while N-boy worked on them) is paying off!

N-boy: did my very favorite lesson in FLL2 this week. I’m not having him do both of the composition exercises at the end of FLL2, nor the dictation exercises, so he should finish FLL2 next week!

R-girl: is slowly, slowly working on verbs.  It wouldn’t be so slow if we were more consistent.  Conceptually, this totally makes sense to her.

Writing:

M-girl: finished the Pilgrim’s Progress and Borrower’s lessons.  I think her penmanship is lovely.

N-boy: worked on the composition from FLL2.

Spelling:

M-girl: we’ve finally hit some lessons where she missed words: disappointed, government, governor, squirrels, turquoise.

N-boy: those ie and ei words are sooo tricky.  He did a good job with them, but had some review to do too.

Latin:

We learned the Action Songs in Song School Latin during Circle Time.  That’s fun.

Penmanship:

M-girl: Done!

N-boy: we did some more last week, but me teaching capitals on the fly seems to help him just as much.

R-girl: is still working on b.

History:
Vikings and Saxons and British and William the Conqueror and English life … I could stay here in Medieval England for a while.  We did maps and pictures and read books on castles and listened to Jim Weiss read SOTW 2 and enjoyed it so much.  I think we may stay here until break.

Science:
We read about Solar Eclipses and watched some YouTube videos about it.

Geography:
We learned about Earthquakes and Volcanoes.  We watched several YouTube videos showing earthquakes and volcanoes.  We also watched a Netflix movie about The Ring of Fire.  Definite evolutionary content, but seeing the volcanoes was more what I was about.

Fine Arts:
Homeschool Choir is a big hit.  We also had 2 piano lessons each this week.  N-boy has been wanting to learn to write music, and had made his own arrangement of Jingle Bells, so our teacher took the time to show him how to do that:

We also did art with our group.  We learned about blending colors when using oil pastels.

Read Alouds:
Well, um.  We read from Heaven some more.  We read the “Daily Bread” Parable From Nature.  We enjoyed visiting after dinner and talking about important things.  I had a meeting one evening and Jason another evening.  I did read Ox-Cart Man for the first time to the children (how absurd! I knew I should read it long ago, it was just necessary to borrow it from the library …)

Bible:
We’re doing very well with our Philippians 2:1-18 memorization.  We finished learning For All the Saints (ahead of schedule!).   Continued with catechizing and talking.