Academic Report

Sitting here at the computer, Saturday morning, thinking about the past week, makes me feel pretty good about our progress. We didn't do any Latin this week, which is the one thing I know we slipped on. But other than that we are where we should be more or less.

Henry started Get Ready for the Code this week. It is going pretty well but I have a hard time stopping him from just randomly going through the book and doing which ever pages he wants. That is how he has previously done workbooks and coloring books so it has been a hard habit to break. He is always the first to grab his book when it is time to do table work. I also finally cut out all the games and things from Happy Phonics which arrived this week (Ebay is a wonderful thing!). I hope it will be helpful for Ian and Henry with their reading. I have also made more of an effort to read a few fun books with Henry this week. He usually sits in with the books we read for science or history but a few Richard Scarry books were right up on his wish list this week and I took a little time to read them to him. Molly enjoyed them too.

Ian finished Explode the code 1 1/2 and moved on to ETC 2. It is getting easier for him but he is still sounding out words he has encountered a number of times. He also reads a lesson out of the Mcguffey reader each day as well. His reading is coming along. He is also getting close to finishing Singapore Math 1A. He really needs to learn to read the problems for himself. The adding and subtracting are easy for him and his writing is improving a lot!
Ian on his new bike
All the kids enjoyed learning about India this week. They colored in flags of India and pictures of the Taj Mahal. Sophie went a bit overboard with the mapwork, adding in all the mountains and cities from the atlas we were looking at. And as I said in my last post, she marked the route Phineas Fogg took through the area.

We read about carbon and zinc this week for science. We didn't do any experiments to go along with Carbon but they did recall all the carbon dioxide we made when we did our volcano last year and such. Zinc was sort of interesting to read about and the kids had fun filing down the pennies I gave them so we could get past the copper and to the zinc which makes up most of the penny.

We will have to wait to see if the vinegar makes the zinc corrode leaving only the copper. I guess it takes a week or more to do that. We could see the bubbles form on the pennies when we put them in. Just a day later the pennies had already changed color.

Sophie also wrote a bit about the experiment and even did a notebook page about Mendeleev this week.

Sophie hit another review in her Singapore Math book so we took one day off before moving onto the next section. We read the next mathematician in our Mathematician are People too book. This time it was about Archimedes. It told us a story that we had heard before on this audio book about how Archimedes used water displacement to figure out if a crown was pure gold or had silver inside it. It also referred to his study of shapes and circles in particular. So we did a notebook page about Archimedes as well as pi.
The next section of her Singapore Math book is about Fractions. And somehow Sophie has gotten it into her head that fractions are hard. She did the first few exercises this week quite easily but I took one day and just did some fun fraction things with her. I got ideas from this squidoo page and we played a fraction domino file folder game. They seem to have helped her visualize fractions a little more and see how they work.

Sophie hasn't been fighting as much about doing her penmanship. She loves writing Lewis Carrol poems so does it without complaint lately. We even squeezed a bit of language arts in again. We used our Primary Language Lessons book. I really think we need to stick to doing this as often as we can but it is hard to get her to write more if she has already had to write for math, science or history already. She doesn't mind reading her McGuffey's reader and talking about the passage.

We had a rainy day on Friday so we had to break out a few fun things for the kids to do since we couldn't go out for our normal ride around the block. So they made some Christmas ornaments from a kit I picked up a week or two ago.
They really wanted to get the Christmas tree out but I had to tell them we couldn't until the first Monday in December. That has been our rule for the last few years. We will see if we can wait that long since November 30th is a Monday I have a feeling we will be getting it out then. I am really going to try to go until the 7th. I don't know if I can handle the tree up for the entire month of December. We live in too small a house to devote that much space to it for too long.

Henry remembered our other rainy day activity and begged and begged for it to get blown up. So we got out "the ball thing" too.

It was a good week. I still haven't figured out how to put artist and composer study back into our schedule. It feels like we "do school" a lot of the day as it is. I want to make sure the kids also have plenty of time to play with their legos and playmobils as well as get outside a lot. Maybe when Molly isn't quite so demanding I will feel a little more free to put these things back into the line up.