Week 8: Plodding along...

OK. The title may actually be a bit of a misnomer. My kids breezed through the week with no problem. I'm the one plodding. Allergies and colds are just no fun when you can't take any medicine. We also had DH home for almost all of the week after he injured his elbow doing some lifting at work on Monday. All in all, despite some headwinds, we did accomplish almost all of our work.

MATH

Jessie finished up adding and subtracting with fractions at the beginning of the week and moved on to some new topics. She breezed through mixed numbers and then improper fractions and even did an extra assignment quite by accident. She skipped exercise 23 and did 24 instead this morning. Since 23 was really short, I suggested she go ahead and do it as well. She sat down and zipped through the exercise in under five minutes. Who says fractions are hard?

Violet spent the week finishing up multiplying and dividing by 4. Friday, we introduced multiplying by 5. She loves school again and even claims to love math (at least until we get to something else that is actually challenging).

LANGUAGE ARTS

Spelling is going well. In dictation, Jessie has switched to the battle section towards the end of The Horse and His Boy (her choice). She's completed all of the textbook work in R&S4 for section two, which covers different sentence types and how to diagram them. After a test on Monday, we'll be ready to move on to the next section. Her CW Aesop selection for the week was "The Eagle and the Fox". We didn't do quite as much editing as I wanted, but a foggy brain can only process so much. She did a bit better in being responsible for her independent reading this week. I think starting a new book next week will also help increase her interest again. Our biggest change for this week is a new pencil grip called the Writing Claw. It has three little cups that you put your fingers in to ensure correct pencil grip. I have both girls using it for all of their work. We're going to try to stick with it for a month and see if there is any improvement. Jessie had some trouble with the new grip for the first couple of days, but seems to be getting used to it. I truly hope this will finally help her give up her fist grip style hold that we've been struggling with for a while. The only downside is that I still have to watch their hand position. They have a tendency to forget to angle their paper and to write from the side.

Violet's spelling and grammar are both going well. In our modified FLL, we finished up pronouns this week. She hasn't memorized the full list yet, but it will still be in her memory box to finish learning next week while we move on. On the right is her copywork of the new poem that was introduced this week. She thought it was really cool this morning, when I copied a couple of sentences out of The Horse and His Boy for her to use for copywork. Personally, I just thought it was convenient because the book was already on the table. After seeing her face light up, I may try doing some passages out of books more often instead of sticking mostly to Bible verses and poems that she is memorizing.

MEMORY WORK

Jessie is making excellent progress through the Ten Commandments and will most likely finish that passage sometime next week. Violet has finished memorizing the 23rd Psalm, so I really need to find something new for her to work on next week. I'm leaning towards Psalm 121, but haven't made a final decision yet. Both girls began working on a new poem this week called Love Between Brother and Sisters by Isaac Watts. I got a little bit of eye rolling out of both of them when they read the first two lines, so I'm sure the message came across loud and clear.

HISTORY

History was a bit disjointed this week. I never did find a really good book to read about the Santa Fe Trail. We ended up reading a fictional picture book describing one young girl's journey on the trail so I decided to skip the narration. The book we were supposed to read on the Erie Canal had gone missing from the library system. We read a couple of paragraphs out of Guerber's The Great Republic instead. To be honest, I was too tired to do narrations so they got a second easy history day this week. For fun, they had one picture book with the words to the Erie Canal song and another about Erie Canal pirates. Violet was horrified when DH insisted that she tell him what the books were about, but I told her DH was allowed to ask questions about anything he chose and she was expected to answer. (Not the answer she was hoping for.) She wasn't happy, but she did finally tell him about the books. On Friday, we did maps of both the Santa Fe Trail and the Erie Canal and added both to our timeline as well.

In science this week, we wrapped up lesson 13 in Zoology one. Tuesday, we completed a flap book about grasshopper, crickets, and katydids. Thursday was an accordion book on aphids and cicadas that I put together at the last minute on Thursday morning before breakfast. Luckily for me, it was a short section or they would have gotten the day off.

LATIN

Latin was one area where we struggled with consistency this week. I was too tired to review with Jessie each day. As a result, she struggled a bit more with the vocabulary and hadn't completely memorizing the grammar chant by the end of the week, so we'll have a bit of catch up to do next week.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny did an excellent job with all of his vowels this week in his vowel game. I still see a tiny bit of uncertainty when he does the e sound, but he definitely has the remaining sounds down pat. Monday we'll try a new page in PP and see how it goes. For reading this week our theme's were Israel and camels. I'm finding it a bit harder to correspond animals to countries than I had expected. Since a couple of the camel books were about a camel taking gifts to baby Jesus, it worked out well. As usual, Benny loves his camel craft. He especially loves being able to move the legs, head, and tail.