Week 19: Getting Going Again

Overall, it's been a good week. The kids are settling back into the school routine. The new schedule seems to be working for the most part with only a minor bit of tweaking here and there. Here our week:

MATH

Jessie has finished up the section on weights and been doing some general review exercises in the textbook. She's actually been finishing up most days in under an hour. It seems that having me in the room to keep Violet on task and help her as needed has the added benefit of helping Jessie stay on task as well. The fractions in the Miquon book finally seem to be clicking for her as well. After the first day of groans, she has breezed through the other pages fairly quickly without any problem.

Violet has had an excellent week in math. I think that she's finally getting comfortable with working the larger problems in her head. Most days she done two or three times as many assignments as I had planned. Yesterday she worked through all of the addition problems in the Intensive Practice section of numbers within 100 in half an hour with only 3 mistakes. On the plus side, the review has given her a boost of confidence that she can do well at math. I think the attitude change alone has probably helped her tremendously.

LANGUAGE ARTS

The girls started memorizing a new poem this week, Try Again by William Hickson. We used the poem for copywork and dictation for most of the week. The girl's have really been enjoying Elin's Amerika by D'Angeli for literature. Violet even asked to borrow the book once or twice to look at it. Spelling is going well. I finally took time with both girls this week to go back through the list of trouble words and figure out which ones actually still need some work. We're also worked on catching up with Jessie's Latin vocabulary this week. Apparently I never made vocabulary cards for the last lesson so we have a few more words to work on than usual. (Hmm.. Add to to do list to write out remaining latin cards for the year.)

Geography / History / Science

The girls are still plodding steadily through the geography booklets. This week we finished Maine and Maryland. I'm glad to see that they still seem to be enjoying our lapbook. I was afraid that would start to get tired of it by now. They are also progressing nicely through the 50 Nifty United States Song without any motivation on my part.

For history we finished reading about the woodland indians. I turned over part of the reading to the girls to save some time. This allowed us to also cover Marquette and Joliet exploring the Mississippi River.

Our first week of science went well. The booklets I made definitely seem to be working for the girls as a means of reinforcing the material. Violet did have a notebook both days and took "notes" while I was reading. I think she just wrote down whatever struck her as interesting. It certainly wasn't the same information that I had marked down as important. I think next week I'll try letting them look at the booklet first so that they have an idea of what to listen for and see how that goes. I think Benny learned as much as the girls did while listening. He was looking on as I helped Violet fill in her booklet Thursday and managed to come up with the correct answer twice before she did. I'll post pictures of the booklets next week when we finish lesson 1.

ART / MUSIC

No official art lessons this week. Violet and Jessie want to try out the origami kits they received from my MIL. Hopefully we can sit down and work on some of those this evening. As far as music, we got our piano lessons started again with both girls.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL
Preschool has gone really well this week. We added in some new games for learning out numbers and letters. On Monday, I gave Benny a dot to dot puzzle with the numbers 1 through 6. I talked him through where to draw each line after he located the numbers we needed. For the alphabet we created two versions of what I'll call hide and seek alphabet. I wrote all of the letters that Benny had learned so far on his drawing board. On the first day, I called out a letters and Benny covered it with one of our Sequence Junior chips. The next day we started with all of the letters covered. Benny could remove the chips in any order identifying what was hiding under each chip as we went along. He also took it upon himself to try writing some letters this week. He wrote the big A and the big B. One day he even decided to surprise me by joining in to sing for the whole alphabet song with me.