A Short School Week

We only had three normal school days this week. We took a nice long weekend which left us with just three days. Since most of the schools in our area have the whole week off of school for "ski week", I didn't push anything too hard but we still needed some structure and we all function a little better when we keep to our usual schedule.

We were really good at starting each day with our gospel study. After talking with my Sister in Law this weekend I added a few things to our devotional time routine. It now consists of a little scripture reading of some sort, at least one article from the current Friend magazine, singing through a primary song (usually the one we are working on this month in Primary), working on memorizing the articles of faith, and reading through one of the Gospel Standards. The kids have enjoyed this little mini FHE each morning. Sophie doesn't even mind doing most of the reading for this since this is usually done when I am nursing Molly. This takes about 20 min or so and I think it has worked out really well. We have only done it for 3 days so I guess we will see how well we keep to it.

Since Sophie has been doing the reading for devotional I decided to break out our Story of the World CD's so we could listen to our chapter rather than have her read it like she had been doing. I have missed listening to the CD's. The boys didn't want me to turn it off after just one chapter. I think I will have to put on some of the past chapters for us to listen to so we can review them. This week we heard about the wars over the Americas and specifically the French and Indian war.
In the afternoons I read aloud the book The Sign of the Beaver. I was surprised at how many chapters I made it through each day. The kids kept asking me to read the next one so I read, and read. I finished it in the three days and really enjoyed it. The author does a good job of depicting life just after the French and Indian War as settlers spread more and more onto Indian hunting lands. My kids broke out the indian dress up clothes that we had made a few years back when we read about the American Girl Kaya and had a great time dancing around like "savages".

Sophie did some Math each day. Negative numbers haven't thrown her off at all. She seems to get the concept and had no trouble flying through the exercises each day. Ian too is doing his math almost all by himself now. He certainly has his addition facts in his head. He doesn't have to think about them too much. He must have been listening all the time while we have reviewed things with Sophie.

Ian is doing 3 pages of Explode the Code each day. I don't do a whole lot with this except check his work afterward. He did have trouble when they showed him a picture of a boat and he had to figure out that it was a skiff. Other than that he is doing the work all on his own. His writing is getting better all the time and I can tell his spelling is better than Sophie's. She never went through Explode the Code or anything like it. She just read without me having to do any phonics programs but I can tell he is learning the phonics rules while Sophie is still writing words the way they sound and often leaving out letters.
Sophie and I did play a spelling game this week. I have some magnetic letters and we made a little crossword like puzzle together with the words from a book that we used last week for some of the Language lessons. She seemed to like this so I think I will get those letters out again for other games. We didn't really do any writing. I have decided to give her a break from writing or copy work since we had such fights about it recently. She did her Chinese writing and that was good enough for me.

As for Science we read a book about Calcium which the kids enjoyed. And as an impromptu lesson we learned how to identify spiders since we found a huge one in our house.
We wanted to make sure it wasn't a bad spider that we needed to worry about so I snapped a picture of it and then we went online to see if we could find out more about it. To the best of our knowledge we had a Zoropsis Sinimana Spider and most likely more living in our house. They are not native to the area but seem to be harmless, THANK GOODNESS! since it was found in the room where the baby sleeps.

Speaking of the baby... Molly has officially started getting mobile. She isn't crawling exactly. She pushes herself backward on her tummy and then back to sitting.The kids just get a good laugh at Molly when she gets stuck under to couch. Nothing is safe, we have installed a baby gate in our hallway to make sure she doesn't end up in the lego strewn boys room or the bathroom which never seems to get the door shut or the toilet flushed. I think we are going to need to work on some of these basic life skills.

That was our busy few days.