Saturday, October 20, 2007

End of another week

I can't say it was a particularly eventful week. We just seemed to do the usual.

I think we mostly read books.
We read all sorts of books for history. Our Story of the world chapter this week was about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph so we read tons of story books about these men and their families. Sophie really enjoyed doing the word search from the SoW activity book.

We also read a bunch of books about the skeleton. Sophie really liked learning about the skeleton this week. I often found her curled up in the chair with a skeleton book. She is now full of information about the skeleton that she likes to share with the rest of us. The kids all loved it when I gave them white crayons and black paper so they could draw skeletons. Ian was especially proud of his and couldn't wait to show it to Dad when he got home that night.
She also got excited when she saw that I had brought home all sorts of books about muscles for next week. So it should be another fun week.

We slacked on Language lessons this week. We didn't even do one new lesson, but we still found proper nouns in the books we read. So I guess we reviewed this week. I need to do better next week.

We did listen to a little Scott Joplin music as we played and cleaned house. We also watched a movie about Scott Joplin. It was good to actually see someone playing the famous ragtime music on the piano.

We also actually did a little art study of Michelangelo. Read about him and did our art project which I discussed in my previous post. That was fun. Sophie does glance through the Michelangelo books. She may be a little too intrigued by the naked statues but I am not going to make a big deal about that one and draw her attention to it even more by saying something. I usually just try to point out other things about the statues and move the focus elsewhere.

We picked up a new Singing time video at the library and the kids really enjoyed this one. Zoo Train was a big hit with my kids. They loved acting out all the animal signs. I am always thrilled that they love signing so much. Henry uses his signs all the time. Ian doesn't sign much even while watching the videos but he knows them when I "quiz" him on them as we read books or the words come up during the day.

One lesson that I we did and ended up being a total failure was a lesson on how to tie a bow. Sophie got a pair of shoes that require laces so I thought it was high time she learned this vital skill. I broke out some large strings for us to practice with and tried to teach her how to tie a bow on one of stuffed animals. She had a total meltdown. She just started screaming and screaming about how she couldn't do it and that it was just too hard. I finally had to put her in her room to calm down her tantrum had got me all worked up so that was end of lesson. We tried again on another day to the same end. So now my 6 yr old still can't tie her shoe laces and hates to even look or think about learning this skill. Any help here would be very nice!

Oh... I almost forgot about Math. We are still working through Singapore Math. We only did one lesson in the workbook because I can tell Sophie really needed to do something else. She really isn't a workbook type girl. So we played games like pyramid 10 (Thanks Lee) and Sum Swamp. It was good for her to just play games this week. Hopefully we can progress through the Singapore lessons in the future. I just know we will be playing a lot of games along with our math lessons.

Sophie still reads a book, draws me a picture and does some kind of copy work each day. The boys play and play and then read and read with me and then play some more. They love it when we take our park trips or play outside which we have done quite a bit recently due to the nice weather.

I miss rowing books.... I think I am going to have to schedule them in. I think the boys would get a lot of that and Sophie wouldn't mind a review of some of the books we really enjoyed. And there are still several that we haven't done.

That is my review of our week.... It is good to know that we actually did a lot. It didn't feel like we did much this week but once I wrote it all down. We actually did a lot.

4 comments:

Ice Cream said...

It souds like you homeschool the same way I do. Looks like a great week.

Anonymous said...

That IS why we write it down. It does add up to a lot even when we don't think we did much.

My almost 7-year-old still can't tie. Luckily shoes still come with velcro. I tried to push some tie ones last time he needed shoes, but he didn't want them.
Someday! (I hope.)

Sonja said...

You DID do a lot!! Your kids sound happy and bright and loved and that is what I love about homeschooling. You know, my eight year old didn't learn to tie his shoes untill he was seven. We tried everything. He finally decided to learn when he saw a friend tying his shoes...he learned it in 15 minutes. They learn so much better when they WANT to. :D Frustrating sometimes for parents though.

Anonymous said...

Oh! so many things in your post sound like me! My daughter also really enjoyed the Abraham/Isaac/Jacob chapter.
And I'm also considering going back to rowing....mostly for my 3 year old (I feel like he gets neglected during school...).
And....my daughter isn't quite loving Singapore like I'd hoped. Workbooks cut the fun out for her, I think. Though she did LOVE the SOTW word search, too.....