Week 32: Moving Along

We didn't quite finish up everything on my list this week. DH found out Monday that he had the flu so we did a lot of extra disinfecting. Jessie woke up with a fever on Friday. Since I also had an OB appointment that morning, we cut school back to the absolute basics. Overall, it was still a good week.

MATH

Jessie really struggled with the Singapore Challenging Word Problems book this week. It was the first time that she had ever hit a problem that required drawing the bar diagrams in order to find a solution. It didn't help that on Monday, when she needed help, my brain was too tired and foggy to explain the bar diagrams in a way that she could understand. I spent Monday afternoon working through the problems myself, and Tuesday we tried again. We worked through two of the examples, and then I had her rework the first twelve problems doing only the odd ones with bar diagrams for each one. Wednesday, instead of working the second 12 problems, I cut it back to 6 of the more challenging ones and finished the section off on Thursday. I'm hoping the multiplication section will be easier for her next week.

Violet has spent the week multiplying by 3 and did a great job. I can only recall one careless mistake in her workbook exercises. She's loving math right now simply because it is fun and easy. She's also quite excited to be almost finished with herMiquon book.

LANGUAGE ARTS

There's not a lot to report here since we've started finishing up some of these subjects. The memory work was continued from last week. We're continuing copywork and dictation through the end of the month. Jessie has 5 words left on her misspelled list to work on next week, and then hopefully she'll be finished with spelling. We did do the grammar part of the CW lesson on Moses on the Mountain, but I've decided that I would rather have a shorter story to work with for the writing portion next week. We'll probably substitute a different fable from Aesop instead.

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY / SCIENCE

In geography, we completed booklets on Texas, Utah, and Vermont. It's hard to believe we'll be finished in two more weeks and ready to assemble the lapbooks. For history we've been reading about the Boston Tea Party and Samuel Adams. The timeline figures and booklets didn't get done Friday since Jessie was sick so we'll try to catch up with those on Monday.

In science we have finished the section on birds. On the right is a picture of our crossword puzzle booklet for this lesson.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

Benny had a light week with lots of extra play time. We did do preschool 3 days. No new letters were added since he's still working on V and W. We also did some more counting. He does great except that he keeps leaving out 15. I'm sure it will sink in eventually. No Kumon books this week. He preferred to color in a regular coloring book or simply draw fish on a blank sheet of paper. He also pulled out his scissors and made boats from the scraps of cardstock left over from the girls' science booklets. (At least he cleaned up the mess without a complaint.)