Week 33: Starting down the home stretch

It's hard to believe that April is almost over. With May just around the corner, it's almost time to welcome our newest baby, take a break from the full school schedule and relax more, and enjoy the beautiful weather that has already started. We had a bit of a rough start to our week, but overall we did accomplish alot.

MATH

Jessie is still really struggling with the CWP book this week. We actually only completed the second section because we worked through the whole section twice to give her more practice with the diagrams. For whatever reason she had a really hard time concentrating at the beginning of the week and was making lots of basic computation errors on her problems. Don't even ask me how many hours of math we did on Monday and Tuesday. It wasn't pretty, but we survived. On Wednesday we started the section over again. It still took her a long time to work the problems, but she did much better with basic computation and just focussing on the assignment. I've come to the conclusion that we simply need to work through the book very slowly so that she masters the technique of drawing and using the bar diagrams to solve the problems. We'll continue math over the summer a few times a week until it's finished.

Violet's still breezing through her math. She's finished up the text and workbook section of multiplying and dividing by 2 and 3. That just leaves one IP section and the end of the semester reviews before she is finished with this year's math.

LANGUAGE ARTS

For memory work, the girls are continuing memorizing the 13th chapter of I Corinthians and the poem, The Swing. This will be the last new material we work on for this year and then we'll just review over the summer. Jessie was able to correctly spell the last 5 words on her missed words list this week so both girls are now done with spelling. Jessie has a few more grammar lessons, which we'll try to double up on and finish next week. For CW, we picked the fable The Farmer and the Nightengale to use for writing. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to finish editing it because we spent a lot of time at the end of the week getting ready for Benny's birthday party. For Literature, we finished reading The Sign of the Beaver and have started on Mr. Revere and I (although not very consistently this week.)

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY / SCIENCE

It's hard to believe that we've almost finished our US geography lapbooks. This week the girl's completed booklets for Virginia and Washington. That leaves 3 booklets for next week and then we can assemble the lapbook. YEAH!!! We still haven't learned all of the states and capitals, but I'm planning to just practice a few each day either over breakfast or lunch until we finish.

For history we got a lot accomplished this week. We caught up in reading by covering both Phillis Wheatley as well as Paul Revere and his midnight ride this week. We added timeline figures for Daniel Boone, Samuel Adams, the Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere. We also assembled booklets to correspong with our timeline figures with an additional booklet for Phillis Wheatley. Rather than drawing our on maps, I found and printed a map of Paul Revere's ride which also has little clocks showing what time he was doing what.

For science, we started the Apologia chapter on bats. I will confess that the girls weren't too excited in the beginning, but have since decided that bats aren't so bad after all. We completed booklets on echolocation and types of bats. We also started a booklet with more general information that we'll be finishing up next week.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

Benny has been quite busy with his new toys from various family members that he received for his birthday. He's spent a lot of time building with the Kids K'Nex Transportation set (which I also find to be really cool). We actually did preschool 3 days this week. In letters, we've added Xx. In numbers, we're just practicing counting. He still forgets fifteen most of the time. For number recognition, he's taken to reading the numbers on the VCR clock to his sisters several times a day. He does very well up to 8. He still gives me a skeptical look when I try to explain that what looks like a g is actually a 9.