Weekly Report Week 3: 1/24/2011-1/28/2011

We had a pretty good week.  We did Circle Time on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday even though on Tuesday we were leaving the house for open gym! Hooray! A breakthrough 🙂  On Wednesday, we started Circle Time late and finished early.  Double Hooray! I’ve been doing a bunch of self-ed this week on Charlotte Mason methods, watching videos Anna lent me from Simply Charlotte Mason.  Good stuff.

Memory Work:

Bible: Started working through God’s creation of man.  Happily, this is what we studied during Bible lessons this week.

Catechism/Creed: I think all three children will be moving to new sections after recitation tomorrow 🙂  And starting Monday, we switch to the Nicene Creed.

Hymn: We went ahead and started Amazing Grace this week.  I decided that being a little ahead wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Poetry: We chose to do The Clouds instead of My Gift by Rosetti.  I think they’ll be moving on next week here too.

Counting: Still reviewing skip counting from last year.  We’ll move on next week.

Other Memory Work: We started memorizing the parts of the plant (Root, Stem, Flower, Leaf, Fruit) and have a little poem to add for next week.  They seem to have the Continent and Oceans song down.  We’ll add something new next week.  We also need to start some timeline memorization, but I haven’t found one I love.

Phonics:

N-boy:  He has been working very hard, asking to do three or four lessons to get through.

R-girl:   Duh.  I pulled out the magnet letters and the cookie sheet to stick them to and she could focus on reading the words.  Beautiful.

Assigned Reading:

M-girl: I bought her a new copy of Little House in the Big Woods as the one from my childhood is falling apart.  Hopefully she’ll finish this now.

N-boy: He read a couple more Frog and Toad stories.

Math:

M-girl: She is now working on up to 9s.  We did two lessons.

N-boy: Two lessons here, too.  He’s working on 4s. The big picture is becoming clear to him.

R-girl: She chose math one time this week and we did half of the lesson.

Logic:

M-girl: She did two pages of logic nicely.

N-boy: He answered two Mindbenders with few problems.

Grammar:

M-girl: We finished First Language Lessons 1! Celebrate!

N-boy: He started a lapbook for FLL 1.  He is enjoying working on it, cutting and writing 🙂

Writing:

M-girl:  We did two lessons from Writing With Ease.

Spelling:

M-girl: She spelled through the first section of words in Spelling Power.  Still haven’t determined where to start her.  We’re taking our time.

Latin:

M-girl: She did Lesson 1 this week.  Loved telling Daddy that “toga” means “toga.”  She also has been very careful about her pronunciation (we’re doing ecclesiastical as classical singing is more likely than majoring in Classics someday in the distant future), listening carefully and speaking carefully.

Penmanship:

M-girl: She’s working on “o” which is tricky with the tail being high.  She’s having a hard time, but we’ll keep working.

N-boy: He’s working on “5”, and wishes he were writing letters.

History:

We read about the Nile River valley and the growing cycle.  We read about Pharaoh being a “god” and some about they mythology of Ancient Egypt.  Today, we made a Nile river and saw how the overflowing brought silt up out of the riverbed:

Smoothing the dirt and creating a valley.

We’ve already flooded the river, and are now planing in the fine silt.

Finished and ready to grow!

Spanish: Not started yet.

Science:

We read from Plant Parts for this week.  Still need to do the experiment, but will probably do that tomorrow as we haven’t purchased the carnations (oops, Mom!)  We read about buds and flowers.

We also did our first Nature Study.  We suited up in snow clothes, went to a local park and traipsed about looking for our “every month” spot.  I think we found a good one! We saw animal prints, heard birds, we threw snowballs.  We pulled tree branches down and looked at buds.  The lake is frozen with snow atop.

R-girl’s footprints, M-girl’s tree buds, N-boy’s neat tree with a stump and “river”

Art:

We did our Nature Journaling, with drawing.

We also made some decorations for Valentine’s Day from ribbons and hearts.  Beautifying our home 🙂

Read Alouds:

Two more chapters of Burgess! Can’t wait to finish.  Chugging along through Mouse and the Motorcycle.   One story left from The Jungle Book.  Lots of choices to make in the next week or so. 

Bible:

We’ve been busy in and out this week.  We’ve read some from Catherine Vos.  When Jason isn’t home, we’ve been reading from Susan Hunt’s Sammy and His Shepherd and discussing the questions.  I really like it.

We also worked on Covenantal Catechism Lesson 3 talking about the creation of man.  This is so wonderfully well done!