Weekly review

I kinda feel like I have already shared our week through my other posts but we actually did do a lot of school this week.

I finally introduced our Composer for the month, Aaron Copland. I am surprised there is so little I could find about him at the library. I could only find one book about him in our Library system. But Sophie has read through that book a few time. The library didn't even have a CD with just Aaron Copland music. He is often included on sampler disks and such so I finally found a good CD on CDSwap and It came this week. We listened to it a few times. The first time Sophie didn't really love it. But she asked me to play it again for her another day while we played with trains and she really liked it. I think we will listen to the Classics for Kids show about Aaron Copland next week.

I tried to introduce Mary Cassatt this week but she didn't go over quite as well. Sophie just doesn't seem that interested in her artwork. But we looked at some of her pictures and read a little bit about her life. Some of her artwork is done in pastels so we went to the craft store and bought some to try them out. The kids had a great time. I had forgotten how messy this medium is and I don't use hairspray so didn't have any in the house. I used to use hairspray as a fixative for my artwork in college. So their works of art are very smeared. I will do better next time we give pastels a try.
We didn't have as many fights about math this week. We are still working our way through our workbook. Sophie is slowly starting to get the hang of it or at least is more willing to work out the problems. So that is good!

For History we finished our reading of Gilgamesh and started the chapter on India. We read through a few books about india and talked about pakistan which is where the indus river is today. Our old neighbors are from pakistan so it was very interesting for Sophie.

We did another lesson on poetry from the intro to Poetry book. I also found a great book about poetry called R is for Rhyme.

We always enjoy our science study. This week Sophie decided we would study the digestive system after we finished up a little more study of the circulatory system. So we got some books about that from the library and have been reading that the last few days. She really wants to study the brain next week but I have the respiratory planned. We will see who wins.

We also did our FIAR book, The Pumpkin Runner. Ian and Henry loved this book. They would both be so excited to climb up in my lap and read it with me. Sophie decided the FIAR was for the boys and didn't actually come and sit on the big story telling chair with me but I know she was listening each time we read it. She also made sure we watched Finding Nemo which takes place in Sydney and listened to our Wiggles CD. We talked about all the Australian animals too. We spent a lot of time looking at our Children's Atlas picture of Australia. Ian can now find that country on the globe and world map. I fell short on a Language arts lesson to do with the boys but we did read about pumpkins and how they grow. I still have to cook up the pumpkins to make cookies. Maybe I will do that this afternoon some time.

We played a lot and read a lot and my kids are happy so it was a successful week.
Ian is still doing great at Soccer. He plays in all his games now and is getting a lot more aggressive which is both good and bad. Henry is talking a lot more and signing a lot too.