Weekly Report: Week 1 (January 9-13, 2012)

Ah, the first week back.  It always seems to be good and bad to return to a “set” schedule.  Our schedule is *tight* with a lot to do in what suddenly seems to be not nearly enough time.

One big change we’ve made this year is that we have all 5 days together.  Since M-girl was 3 months old, my parents have blessed me by keeping the children one day a week so I could run errands by myself.  I’ve been so thankful for all they’ve done for us!  This year, though I decided that we really need that day for lessons.  Now to find a time to grocery shop.

Because we have that whole extra day, I’m spreading out some of our Circle Time so we aren’t trying to do everything every Circle Time anymore!  I’ve been able to shorten, then, from an hour and a half to an hour and its so much more manageable.

We’ve been reviewing Memory Work this week, and I had kind of planned on an all-review January, but the kids seem to have picked up pretty much where they left off.  We’ll keep reviewing hymns, but I think we’ll be moving forward in most everything else.

Another big change is that I’m having M-girl and N-boy do a lot more assigned reading during their independent work.  They still have some assigned written work (logic worksheets and geography worksheets that they love, a workbook on telling time for N-boy), but not as much. I’m completely dropping Explode the Code and Math Mammoth for them unless they become necessary.

I’m a bit at a loss as to what to have R-girl do during her independent time.  She is a bit, er, flighty.  She likes to work on some things, but will just stop in the middle and walk away at times, but she is almost incapable of entertaining herself.  Unfortunately, she isn’t reading well enough to follow directions on her own … or assign books too.

Phonics:

R-girl: is having a bit of a time picking back up where we left off.  In particular, she’s having a difficult time with /ch/ and blends like /scr/.  Happily, there’s plenty of review in OPG, so we’ll keep plugging away.  She finished Lesson 81 today.

Assigned Reading:

M-girl: is reading Ramona the Brave for her literature reading.  She chose from stacks of library books a history and a geography or science book to read and narrate each day.  I did the scribing for her, but she illustrated the narration and did quite well with this as a whole.

N-boy: is reading The Whale by Cynthia Rylant.  He also chose a history and science or geography book each day to narrate from.  I scribed for him too.  When he draws a picture – or wants to draw – this is excellent.  We need to work on this. He didn’t quite finish today’s.  He’ll be working with the Headmaster (read: Daddy) on these over the weekend …

Math:

M-girl: is working on adding up to 20s in MEP.  She’s doing really well with this, I’m chomping at the bit to be further on.

N-boy: is working on adding up to 12s in MEP.  He’s doing pretty well, although struggling a bit with the relationship between adding and subtracting.  Sometimes, his math intuition is spot on … and sometimes he’s just guessing.  We need to work on not getting frustrated when it is just a little challenging.

R-girl: started MEP Y1 and she’s doing a great job.  Y1 starts nice and slowly and there’s a lot of movement (read: jumping) that appeals to her.  She also seems to really like copying the pattern.

Logic:

M-girl: worked through her four logic pages, and was very logical.  I pre-copied this year so all I have to do is pull out the pages, staple, and say “this is due Friday.”  She likes the autonomy of choosing how and when to accomplish her work.

N-boy: worked through four logic pages, and these were his favorite independent work.  He also likes the self-directed packets due by Friday.

Grammar:

M-girl: is working on chanting prepositions.  She also learned about Synonyms, Antonyms, and Thesauri this week.

N-boy: is working on Mr. Nobody (and they always say, by “Mr. Nobody”)

Writing:

M-girl: did the Velveteen Rabbit copywork and narrations.

N-boy: started Writing with Ease 1 with “Pa owned a pig.”  He had to concentrate hard to use upper and lower case letters and spaces between words correctly.  I really think this curriculum is a nice gentle way to introduce writing.  

Spelling:

M-girl: starting learning about changing -y to -ies for plural.

N-boy: started working through the pretests to determine where he needs to start.  He is doing this orally for now, but will switch to written when we find out.

Latin:

M-girl: did none this week.

N-boy: started Lesson 1.  He really liked it, but we didn’t get the workbook until late this week, so we’ll spend some time catching up here.

Penmanship:

M-girl: learned to write “v.”

N-boy: is working on “b.”

R-girl: should get started here, I think she’ll really like it.

History:  This week we read about the Persians and Cyrus the Great.  Happily, the chapter started with a bit of review.  We did the map work and looked at the globe.

Science: This week we read about the last three senses: hearing, taste, and smell.  We learned about frequency and amplitude of sound waves.  We learned about taste and smell being closely related.  We’re looking forward to doing a “tongue mapping” project early next week before moving on to the spleen, pancreas, gall bladder, and urinary system (which is in My Body but not in God’s Design for Science: The Human Body)  There don’t seem to be a lot of books on this at the library, either.

Art:  We did our “self portraits” on Monday and had our friends over for Art on Wednesday where we studied how artists see line.

Read Alouds:  We finished Mary Poppins recently and the children liked it while Jason and I didn’t care for it.  We started Little Britches and think we’ll really like it.  We read a little bit of House at Pooh Corner this week and worked a bit on The Bronze Bow over break.

Bible: We finished the Vos Children’s Story Bible last night! Yay! We are happy to recommend it, we really enjoyed reading it.  The kids and I did a review week for Covenantal Catechism, reviewing the Psalms, Memory Verses, and the songs for The Books of the Old and New Testaments.