This Week

Another really bad picture of one of the kids' projects. The finished ziggurat.

Things are just a blur. By the time I get to Friday, Monday is just a vague memory and by next week I'll have forgotten this week ever happened. So I think it's a good thing I have this blog and these reports. So let's see what I can reconstruct.

Harry:

He is still working in WWS. He's on week 4 and has just started the topos section. He read that he had to write a paragraph or so that is between 150 and 300 words and just about cried. So I showed him the word count on just one of my blog posts and he was somewhat mollified. Meaning he didn't actually cry, but he also didn't jump up and do the work. It got pushed back to Monday by the need to get to football. Lucky kid.

I have somehow become a person that does several different math and Language Arts programs in the hopes that, I don't know, the kids will know everything and no one will ever think their homeschooling was a failure. Something like that. So, we read about direct and indirect objects and subject complements in Grammar Town. We really do have a lot of fun with that curriculum. It's so worth it. And eventually we'll finish Grammar Town and move onto the rest of the books.

Harry has been plugging away at Latin for Children for oh, the past two years. As of right now I don't have any real specific goals for him in Latin, other than lean it, so this is fine. But I was reading on the WTM boards last night how other people do the program and it gave me some great ideas. So we're going to try a few of those and see how it goes.

Science was human reproduction. He did all of the work asked of him in My Pals are Here and now knows how babies grow inside the mother. He's known the mechanics of how babies are made since a second-grader at his old school told him. The lesson was pretty much review and he's moving on now.

Papyrus (grass) started growing along our Nile River this week, so of course I took a picture or twelve. (Look, it's a centimeter higher than ten minutes ago, quick guys, get the camera!) We also read about Hammurabi and his code of laws, did the maps for that and for Abraham and the Israelites, and Harry outlined the relevant pages in the red KHE.

And since Harry's reading assignments go with history, he finished the Illustrated Children's Bible and started something else, that I can't remember all of the sudden. Oh, The Broken Tusk. We'll be starting India soon and since the library's copies of any Gilgamesh stories at all are on hold, we decided to skip around a bit.

Ziggurat in progress.

Sam:

Sam does what I ask him usually with no trouble at all. He goes down his little checklist, does the work and checks it off. He might ask for help if he has a problem, but more likely he will just skip the problem and go to the next thing. So I have to watch him pretty carefully.

Math is fine. He's working through MUS Beta in his own systematic way. This week the focus was on multiplying 9s.. So he did that, took the test and moved on. Sam is incredibly smart, but I have to be careful about how I challenge him because if it's too much for him, he shuts down completely.

Reading...He moved on to the Illustrated Bible. He's a couple of days back from Harry so that they aren't trying to read the exact same thing at the exact same time. It's better that way. The only trouble he had was on answering some questions about "what to you think?" Sam is firmly in the grammar stage in his concrete thinking even though he is an incredible reader, so those questions are tough. But it gave me a good excuse to talk with him about what he'd read.

History is the same as Harry's, minus the outlining. WWE, FLL, and spelling are all going fine. He's just chugging along in them. Although we were feeling silly with the new outlining rule in FLL and we kept drawing lines on his paper until we had a little guy.

Who knew that outlining could be so fun?

I know we did some science together--it was about mass and matter. He finished the chapter and we'll move on next week.

Sam spray painting the ziggurat.

Annika:

I had the hardest time with her at the beginning of the year because she kept asking me over and over for things to do and couldn't just wait.  I'm happy to say that she doesn't bounce right next to me asking for work. She now bounces across the room, so I think that's progress. I actually had the genius idea to create a little board with all of her subjects on it. So she does her math, for instance, then she pulls the little tag off and brings it to me. The she knows what comes next and is usually willing to wait for a minute or two until I can get to her. I usually have the tags organized so she has something that's dependent on me, then something she can do independently next. It really has seemed to help.

Annika's board.

Annika started subtraction this week in Singapore Math. We have little counting bears, so we would set them up and half of them would go to the movies and we'd count the other half. First grade math isn't nearly as stressful as fifth grade math.

WWE, FLL, spelling and reading are fine. Annika learned the definition of a noun and then promptly taught it to her little sister so now they say it in unison, all. day. long. But I guess it's a good thing she knows it, right? We are reading from Tomie DePaola's Book of Bible Stories for reading, so she's going over stories that she mostly already knows. I usually read these to her so she can concentrate on the story, not the reading. She reads to me later from something that she's picked out.

She did the same history as the boys, but we talked about her sense of sight for science. I have a book or two that I want to read with her next week and then we'll move onto hearing.

Annika used her sense of sight to compare these three objects.

These reports always end up longer than they should. I think I just talk to much. So if you've actually read this, thank you. I'll try to make it shorter next week.