Weekly Report Nov 11-15, 2013

We accomplished a sufficient amount for a three day week. Daddy was home on Monday for Veteran’s Day! We purchased a tree for the front yard, so happy to have it accomplished after many years. We enjoyed being together as a family. I found a free worksheet (shh) about Veteran’s Day and its origins from Armistice Day, so that was good to accomplish.

In history we listened to Jim Weiss read the final two chapters of Story of the World II. Hooray! We seem to take about a year and a half for these books, which is fine. The children enjoy it, I like Susan Wise Bauer’s writing style and the narrative. We do need to finish the map work and maybe work on our History Pockets as we’ve learned about more Explorers.

For science this week, the children read books about volcanoes and earthquakes. They wrote or made oral narrations from those books.

Math was an adventure this week. Only M-girl did three math lessons. The others did two. N-boy is 9 lessons from finishing year 2 and R-girl is moving right along in year 2. Included in their lessons this week was one lesson each from Ed Zaccaro’s Primary Challenge Math. M-girl’s lesson was on increasing or decreasing recipes. N-boy’s was on making change. R-girl thought about prices and when to buy bulk or not. I love that PCM works on their mathematical thinking in real life situations. Each child worked on logic this week. M-girl and N-boy are getting very close to finishing the Crypto-Quote Joke book. They both had to deal with decimals today, something they’ve never really seen except in money.

For Literature, M-girl continued reading By the Shores of Silver Lake. R-girl kept working on Homer Price. N-boy finished his book so close to the end of our year that I didn’t assign something new. M-girl did written narrations for writing and R-girl did oral ones. R-girl also did two narrations from Writing with Ease, and wrote one of them.

Grammar ended on a fun note this week. M-girl is getting very close to knowing all of Ozymandias. I was wrong, it does rhyme, just not as obviously as I expected. She finished this week working on summarizing a couple of paragraphs about Mark Twain. R-girl started working on adverbs today. N-boy is working on reviewing different parts of speech. Today it was prepositions and conjunctions. He remembered his prepositions from before and when the book suggested reciting them while spinning, of course he had to try!

In Latin, R-girl is worked on Lesson 21 in Prima Latina.  She’ll be the youngest of my kiddos to finish it with only 4 lessons to go.  I’m kinda shocked by that.  N-boy and M-girl worked a little on their chapters and played some on Headventureland.

Both M-girl and N-boy worked on several states in their geography books.  They’ve studied through Louisiana.  They also kept practicing their typing, which might be N-boy’s favorite.  He *loves* NitroType.com.  They all had piano lessons and practiced most days.  Their teacher is going to do a video recital next Wednesday.  She plans to record them playing their songs at their next lessons.

We mostly had free afternoons and evenings to play, make rainbow loom bracelets, and enjoy one another as a family.  We’re back to reading from the Christian Almanac regularly as well as Thanksgiving: A Time to Remember. These have led to some excellent discussions. in the car we’ve been listening to The Hobbit when the children and I are in the car and Treasures of the Snow when all five of us are together.