5 days of School, 3 Days of Rain

Our school work pretty much went as planned for the week. I don't really have a plan written down anymore. Last Fall I broke out a teacher's plan book and wrote down what we would do each week during the rest of 2008. I thought I would get to writing the rest of the plans for the rest of this school year down eventually but here is is almost through January and I still have blank pages in my plan book. I think that is going to be my goal for the week ahead. I need to actually plan out the rest of this term. We are supposed to start doing astronomy and space for science starting in February. I planned all our biome studies to through January and then we are supposed to move on except I haven't planned what we are going to cover yet or thought about what to study first. Luckily History is always good since we just follow the book through and do a chapter a week. Math just keeps on going without a lot of planning but I know I should really put more fun real math things in. Mostly I just need to map out science, music and art for the rest of the term and then decide what we are going to do over the summer.

Ok... I got sidetracked. I was talking about this week.....

Our History chapter was about the first Russians. When we listened to our chapter, the kids said they already knew this stuff. Evidently my husband had shown them a movie last week that had already taught them all about the Russians. He had shown them Engineering an empire which is a History Channel documentary he has been receiving from Netflix and decided to watch last Saturday while I went shopping or something. But the kids already knew all about Ivan the Great and Ivan the terrible. So we colored our map and some great pictures of Saint Bazil's Cathedral.
We read a few of our favorite Matryoshka books (The littlest Matryshka has been checked out many times. ) as well as a few other Russian folk tales. Sophie didn't really like Clay Boy but she reallly loved The Old Man and His Birds.

Science has been somewhat lacking in excitement. The kids are acting a bit bored with yet another biome. I guess it is a good thing this is our last one and we get to move on (when I finally decide what we are going to cover next.) We read a number of Rainforest books but that was about it.

We did great at our Language Arts this week. We did a lesson every day. Sophie really hated the dictation but she still did it. She didn't mind the copywork and she really loved reading our McGuffy Reader this week. She recognized one of the poems as one that Alice gets all jumbled in Alice in Wonderland. This of course sparked her interest in Alice again and she pulled out our copies of Alice's Adventures and Through the looking glass. We have discussed Alice extensively this week as she rereads her favorite parts. She also broke out both of the Alice Pop up books that we have and she and the boys have been looking through those as well. It has been a bit of an Alice week. I even found out that she changed my IChat icon is changed to Alice. Somehow she knows how to change the icon? Anyway... I am happy with our grammer and reading lessons this week. Ian is still slowly working through his McGuffy Primer. He can read very slowly when he isn't distracted. He still needs some help with some sight words. We played a game of Boggle Jr. and he did well sounding out the words to put the correct letters together to form the words. Sophie had to then play a game of regular Boggle and she did pretty well making words out the letters that turned up.

We did math and had a pretty easy time this week. Sophie is adding and subtracting money with little trouble. She loves it when I break out the real money and she gets to play with it. But I keep finding pennies all over the house. The boys seem to think it is their treasure and have been stealing them to hide in their treasure chests.

We have been reading our New Testament each day and also working on an Article of Faith. Ian can now recite the 2nd article of faith perfectly. So on Sunday he should be able to do it for the Bishop at church and get his piece of candy.

Other than these things we stayed indoor a lot due to the rain we have been getting. I am happy to have the rain but we haven't been out on our walks or out much at all. Not that that is bad either. We have played most of the games from our game closet.

Played with all of our toys.

And I have actually made it through two books since Thursday's trip to the Library. Ok. so they were both from the Children's section. But this is quite an accomplishment sine for the last month I haven't read much of anything. Every time I picked up a book I fell asleep. I am starting to not feel quite so run down and I can actually keep my eyes open a little longer. But I picked up The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Beauty. After finishing Hugo I told Sophie that it was a book she would enjoy. She read the first little bit today. We will see if she is that interested. She liked that it has so many pictures.

That was our week.

How was your?