Week 17: It's Friday!!!!

We had a great week! Almost all of our work got done. I've taken some time to reevaluate what we are doing and will plan a few changes next week for the second half our the school year. Sorry for the long post but it was helpful to put down some of my thoughts in writing as I start thinking about making a few changes.

MATH

Math for Jessie has been a breeze this week. She started working on the section of weights. So far everything has been in grams, kilograms, or some combination of the two. We did have to spend a few minutes one day talking about how to read the scales in the book and how to figure out the value of the increments between the numbers. Afterwards, Jessie has done a great job of working through the problems on her own.
Violet on the other hand has been struggling with the word problems book this week. We seem to have three basic problems. Problem one is that she is not completely comfortable adding and subtracting within 100. As a result, I think after Christmas we going to do some back tracking. My plan is to work through the section of 1B again that deals with adding and subtracting with 100. I don't mind her using manipulatives to work through this section for now, but even with the abacus she's not consistently getting the correct answer. In conjunction with that we are also going to use this time to nail down the memorization of all of her addition facts because this will be extremely helpful to her by section 2 of the 2A book where it teaches adding and subtracting in vertical columns. To compensate for this, I'm changing the goal for the year from getting through all of 2A to getting up to section 5 of 2A completed. Sections 5 and 6 deal with multiplication, which I believe will be an easy place to pick up when we restart math. The second problem is with the way she writes her number sentences. For example, instead of subtracting to find an answer, she will say 24 + what = 50. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, the problem is she just writes 24+26=50, so that when I check her work it looks like the answer for the problem is 50 when it should be 26. The only solution that I can think of is to sit down and work through some work problems with her. The third problem is her lack of confidence. Violet simply doesn't believe that she is good at math (in part because she compares herself to Jessie). The only solution that I can think of for this is for me to sit down and work through her math with her. I fully expect to spend most of the time as a spectator whose main job is to confirm that she is working the problem correctly and that she has come up with the correct answer. That means I'll have to rework our MOTH schedule next week while the kids are off. Hopefully, the time spent this spring will give here the confidence to work more independently when we officially start 2nd grade.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Language arts are going well. Both girls are continuing to do well in spelling. Violet was a little bit worried because her spelling lists have been in both print and cursive for awhile. I assured her that I would be more than happy to print the word lists for her in a few weeks when we move on to the next book because I had to do the same thing for Jessie. Our poetry memorization is going fine. The girls have been ready to start a new poem for a couple of weeks now, but I thought it would be easier to just wait until after Christmas. The one problem we are having in the memory area has to do with our Bible verse memorization. I can give either Jessie or Violet the first word or two of the verse, and they recite it beautifully. If I just give them the reference, then I often get either a blank stare, and "I don't know", or whatever verse pops into their heads first (usually not what I'm looking for). Violet and I sorted through her memory box this morning and pulled out all of the cards that she couldn't match the verse to the reference. We'll spend the rest of this month working on matching these. I'll do the same thing with Jessie later this afternoon. Then based on how we do this month, I'll decide whether or not we'll continue memorizing the Bible verses from Sunday school or if we will do our own memory program probably memorizing a block of verses instead of individual ones.

HISTORY / GEOGRAPHY

Geography is working well. The girls completely booklets on Kentucky and Louisiana this week. I still keep

forgetting to go over their state song. Since the girls can complete the booklets independently, I think I will try to make a tape next week with the geography song on it for them to listen to each day while they work on the

booklets. Once the song is memorized, I can add something with the states and capitals. This should free up a little bit of my time probably for housework (like the laundry that keeps piling up every time I turn around). We did get to history this week. We covered the several new colonies: the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay, New Amsterdam and New Sweden, New Hampshire, the catholics in Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, Roger Williams and Rhode Island, and Maine. In about half of these, we simply read the Truthquest commentary and marked them on the map. We also finally got back to our lapbooks (and even caught up). The booklets we made are on the right. Below we finished our explorer map book and caught up with our colony map on the bottom.

ART / MUSIC

No art this week. Hopefully we'll start that back up in January. We haven't listened to Mr. Bach Comes to Call yet either. I'll let the kids listen to it at the end of next week while they are playing with their Christmas presents.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

Despite the fact that my DH is still off from work this week (and for the next couple while he burns up some extra comp time), Benny and I did do some preschool this week. We read books every day although not always during the set preschool time. Twice this week we tried out some new games for Benny's letter and number practice. On the left we made a simple matching game for his letters. Benny really enjoyed doing this. Thank goodness I sat there and watched him draw the lines. Otherwise I not sure I could have figured out where some of them started and ended. I must say that this first board is much neater than the second one we did this morning. (Benny wanted to do it on his own and he kept drawing lines before he knew where they were going. For numbers we labeled some Styrofoam cups with the numbers one through seven. Then Benny pulled out a bag of chips from our Sequence Junior game and had to put the correct number of chips in the cup. The first day we cleaned up by having Benny find the cup with the number I called on it and dump the contents back into the bag. I've decided we're going to drop the weekly theme for preschool and just let Benny pick out library books or books from our shelves to read instead. The themes were nice, but we didn't always like the books that were listed and some weeks had very few books that were available from our library.