Week 22: Cruising along

It's been a quiet week. The kids have down the basic schedule flow (although they think that lunch should be at 11 instead of 12.) There haven't been any extra projects, appointments, or interruptions to our school day. In fact about half of the week, we actually finished school 30 minutes early. Here's what we accomplished.

MATH

Jessie zipped through the brief unit on graphs in 2 days. About half of the problems reviewed picture graphs which she has already covered, while the other half introduced bar graphs. Then there two days of cumulative review in the workbook before starting fractions on Friday. Jessie struggled with fractions earlier in the year with her Miquon math books. I'm hopeful that she'll remember and apply what she learned as we continue with fraction into next week.
Violet has again managed to complete more lessons that I actually had planned for the week. She finished the last IP assignment for the Singapore unit on numbers to 1000 Monday and started working on the addition / subtraction section Tuesday. The section began with some review (which is why I ended up combining a couple of lessons at her request). By Thursday, she was working on addition without renaming for numbers over 100. This will be the first time that we've actually focused on working the problems on paper instead of mentally. She's done a great job of making the transition from adding left to right in her mind to adding right to left on paper. We're still stalled out in math drill on the +4 and +5 keys. The combination of flash cards and math keys doesn't seem to be making progress. I guess we'll have to make some adjustments to our drilling methods for next week.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Both the girls finished memorizing their current poems this week. Jessie completed Mr. Nobody, and Violet mastered Try Again. Personally I'm thrilled that they'll be back to working on the same poem. My poor prego brain was struggling to learn both poems with both girls.
In grammar, Jessie started a new unit on adjectives. Monday's lesson covered the definition of adjectives and how to diagram them. Unfortunately, Jessie seems to have forgotten everything she learned about diagramming again. We had to go back and review how to find the subject, predicate, and direct object. I think we'll try a combination of more grammar memory work (I've been slacking on adding new cards to her box) and maybe putting 1 or 2 sentences on a dry erase board each day for her to diagram. It's not that I think the diagramming itself is important, but I am concerned that she isn't correctly identifying the parts of a sentence that we have learned so far. On the bright side, Jessie's doing great with her dictation. Thursday, she even picked out her own assignment. She wanted to write the poem engraved by the bell Digory rings to wake up the witch. We've also increased the length of the assignments to at or near a full page without any complaints that her hand is cramping. Yeah!!! Her CW assignment on Julius Caesar is on the left. Our new outlining change from the last assignment is also working great. Violet's spelling and copywork are going fine.

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY / SCIENCE

The girls completed booklets for Mississippi and Missouri this week for their US geography lapbooks. I think we're close to knowing enough of the states for the girls to try the US geography game I downloaded from Shepherd's software. I'd also like to finish up learning the Fifty Nifty United States song in the next few weeks so we can move on to memorizing capitals.
This week in history we learned about King Philip's War and William Penn founding Pennsylvania. We added figures for both to our timeline, labeled Pennsylvania on our colony map, and made narrations for Penn that we'll turn into booklets next week.
In science, we finished up lesson 2 and assembled our booklet for the unit. The girls' favorite part was making the paper strips for the different sizes of birds on Tuesday. We also made simpler feeders from pine cones, peanut butter, and bird seed rather than the ones in the zoology book because I wanted the girls to do all of the work themselves.



BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

Benny's had a great week. Saturday, my mom bought him My Book of Easy Mazes by Kumon at my suggestion. He likes to try to draw letters, but gets frustrated when they don't turn out how he wants. I thought the maze book would give him some more practice at controlling a marker. He was so excited that he insisted we take the book to church on Sunday for him to work on during the sermon. I thought he would do 5 or 6 mazes and then snuggle up with me. Boy was I wrong. He started at maze one and went through the entire book of 80 mazes in less time than it took the pastor to finish his sermon. He's already asking for more maze books. As far as the alphabet we added Jj this week. For numbers we mostly counted on fingers (which Benny finds funny for some reason). He also started working on his new Kumon book, More Let's Cut.