Our Week

I am enjoying having to recap our school week. It helps me evaluate what went well and what we still need to work on. We had a really good week. But there is still room for improvement.

We read through our Story of the World chapter about Sargon, the 1st Sumerian Dictator. I can't say it was the most exciting chapter so we also read the stories of Abraham and Issac this week as well since they lived in that area of the world. And we are going to do the story of Joseph next week. We also talked about the Tower of Babel and how it probably was built in that area of the world and we read the story from the Book of Mormon of the Brother of Jared. We put a number of cards on our wall timeline for each of these men and events. We also read a number of story books that are Middle Eastern tales. The Golden Sandal and Alladin and the magic lamp. More than anything else we got a sense of where the middle east is on the globe and some of their ways.

Sophie started a actual Math program this week. I broke down and bought Singapore Math for her. I know she doesn't like workbook type work so I was always hesitant to do this but so far she hasn't balked too much at it. We started 1A and she already knows most of what is covered so we quickly went through 10 lessons this week. We will slow down once we come to a place she needs help. We also had more lessons with money. My kids love the feel of pennies and dimes and nickels so we break them out a lot and do counting exercises with them. We worked mostly on counting by 2s and 5s. Sophie is finally getting this! Ian just likes it that I let him put his 10 pennies in his piggy bank after each lesson.

Our study of Scott Joplin is going well. We listen to his ragtime music often. Sophie really enjoyed sitting and listening to the Classics for kids programs about Joplin and about ragtime. We added him to our wall timeline as well. I found a movie about joplin at the library we will watch that next week. As well are read a few books about him. I finally found a few at the library.

Sophie has a very quick mind and sometimes I have a hard time slowing her down so we as we have been working through our First Language lessons it has been good to focus just on learning out to narrate. We read the aesops fable of the turtle and the rabbit and she had trouble telling me the story back. She wanted to jump right to the ending of the story and the moral. So we had to practice telling each step of the story. She got it a bit better when she narrated the story back to Dad at dinner.

We are still reading lots of bird books but we going to be moving on to the Human Body. Since Henry is so interested in the Human body lately. (That book still goes all over with us.) We just did an overview of the body this week and will do the skeleton next week. I already know these lessons will be a big hit. The boys will participate a lot.
Here is Henry holding up his new little skeleton man that he got at the pumpkin patch. He loves this little guy.

Sophie is reading very well and continues to read a book to me everyday. I have gotten a bit slack about the writing a sentence for me each day. But she does do the titles for all the cards we added to the Wall timeline this week. She also wrote a little book for me at the YMCA while I went to my water aerobics class one morning. It was a "Book for Boys". She drew pictures of all the things boys like, balls, trains, bob the builder, etc. and labeled all of them and even put a roman numeral on each section. She loves roman numerals for some reason. We learned them while rowing "The Glorious Flight" last year. Ever since she puts them on all sorts of things. Funny what sticks with kids.

One thing that we haven't done is our Artist of the month. Here it is half way through and we haven't even done more than glance at a book about Michaelangelo. I am going to have to get more inventive and make artist study a little more interesting. This is one to work on for next week.

Other than trips to the park and a few nature walks to gather a bunch of fall leaves and of course our trip to the pumpkin patch, that about sums up our school week. We have also been reading tons of books about Halloween and Fall. I love this time of year! We have also really enjoyed the rain we have been getting and I know more is expected for next week.

Here are Sophie and Ian at the Pumpkin Patch posing in front of the pumpkin pyramid.