Week in Review

I don't know how people can get so much work done in a week. We seem to go and go but barely get done what we do get done while leaving a bunch of stuff still undone. But here is our run down for the week.

Lets start with the fun stuff. The Read aloud and Audio books.

I read Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos to my kids. I had fun doing the British accents. The kids loved the story and would beg me to read more and more.  Lots of good information about Ancient Egypt and mummies as well as some magic and adventure.  I got the audio book for the 2nd book in the series and Sophie told me she likes me reading it better. She didn't like the accent of the reader or something. The readers was most likely more authentic. We are now about half way through Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris. We have it going in the car and I am afraid it caused us to be late to our co-op's hike. I was so engrossed in the story I missed our exit and it took us about 15 min to realize the mistake and get back on track.  There are two more books in the series and I am sure we will make it through them quickly.

In the house I have started a new read aloud. This one is for our co-op Book Club, which I am the leader of.  I picked the book The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright. This has been a fun read so far. Each chapter is another Saturday in the life of the Melendy family. My kids are really enjoying it.  I am able to use the "clean up the front room so I can read about another Saturday" trick. I love it when they like books that much. They consider it such a treat to have me read aloud to them.  This one takes place in NYC so no British accents but I still try to give each character it's own voice or style.

So.... from here we will head into the more mundane and less fun subjects.

Math - All kids are working through Singapore books. Sophie is happy she isn't multiplying and dividing fractions anymore. She has moved into a geometry section. I am sure fractions will jump in again but for now it is a nice break.
Ian finished a section on place value and will start something new on Monday.

Henry always seems to be adding and subtracting. I hadn't really thought about how little variety his math has. They try to vary it with little mazes or puzzles but it is still adding and subtracting.

History - We listened to our chapter of SOTW but I can't say we did much else. It was a chapter about Babylon and Hammarabi. Other than map work and drawing a ziggurat we didn't really do much to go along with the chapter. I do have some books on the shelf but we just never seemed to get to them.

Writing - I started a new writing program with Sophie.  It wasn't that I didn't like Writing with Ease but I just felt like she needed something different. It was starting to seem like busy work. So this week we started All Things Fun and Fascinating which is one of the offerings from the Institute for Excellence in Writing.  We did the first two lessons this week and all the practice to go along with it. These were about outlining. And she got it.

Ian is still doing Book 2 of the WWE program and seems to be doing fine with that for now.

Henry is still plugging away at his Explode the Code.

We also looked at two Vermeer paintings and learned how to compare and contrast. The kids made Venn diagrams about The Geographer and The Astronomer.

So this could count as art but I am including it in Writing since it was an exercise to help prepare them for a compare and contrast writing assignment they are going to have to do for the Charter School.

Science - We read some more about the Digestive system. We still haven't made it all the way through and will take another week to finish off this system. I am finding it hard to get more than two days a week of science because we also have our Science workshops that the kids attend. The boys got to see and handle cow hearts at theirs this week. Sophie is raising fruit flies and learning about genetics.

We also made our masks which I talked about the other day and watched some Tin Tin cartoons on Youtube. There was also some Wii Fit and other Wii games that got played because it was raining and we needed to use some of our energy in a more constructive way.

Logic -  I added in some logic workbooks this week. Henry complained a bit since it was "yet another workbook" but it was super easy and he discovered he could fly through three or four lessons rather quickly. He will finish his Lollipop logic book really quickly I think. Ian has Primary Logic and Sophie is doing the Countdown to Logic. These lessons take about 5 min but I hope as they get harder it will help the kids reason through problems. We will see, it is still an experiment.

Piano - The kids are doing great with piano. They practice everyday and I really like having the lesson on Monday and then we watch the DVD lesson on Tuesday to cement what they learned at the lesson and then they have a few days to practice. I need to make sure we get that DVD lesson in on Tuesdays. My kids are going to feel very prepared for their lesson on Monday since they have actually spent a few days practicing the new song rather than we watch it Monday before their lesson, which is what has happened a few times.  So that is my goal for the future. Make that lesson a part of the Tuesday schedule.

That was about it for our week.  Not too shabby. There is still a lot that I wish we could somehow squeeze in but for now this is good.