Week 13: Trying to focus...

It's been a very long week. For some reason it just seemed like everything took twice as long as it should. I'm hoping that it's just a matter of adjusting to the end of daylight savings time. Baby Henry has been waking up every night and coughing for an hour or so before going back to sleep. The other kids haven't complained that he kept them awake, but they have seemed more tired than usual this week. At any rate, we managed to trudge through the week and get almost all of our work accomplished.

MATH
Jessie spent the entire week working through the fractions sections of the Intensive Practice book. Conceptually, I believe she has mastered what she needed to master for this unit. Most of the mistakes this week were either computation errors or errors made simply because she did not read either the directions or the problem carefully. I guess it would be fair to say that the biggest problem was simply concentration. At any rate, I for one have had enough of fractions for awhile and am glad that we only have one more lesson before moving on next week. YEAH!! As far as her CWP book goes, she began CWP 4 this week and has done very well.

Violet is steadily plugging away through the money section of 2B. She spent a couple of days working on mental addition with dollars and cents and did an excellent job. Her confidence level in her ability to add mentally has certainly grown by leaps and bounds since August. Today, she was finally back to doing the work with pencil and paper. I've also seen an improvement in her CWP work. She's done very well at setting up the problems correctly and making certain that she answers the question. She's still making mistakes with her borrowing, but once I tell her she has made a borrowing mistake, she is doing a much better job of correcting it on her own.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Jessie has begun work in the verb unit of R&S 4. For the most part she has done very well at identifying verbs and verb phrases. Spelling was a bit of a struggle this week. There have been more spelling errors in her workbook pages and on her test. I've decided to put it down as part of her overall concentration problem for this week. Hopefully, next week will be much better. We did finish revising "King Alfred and the Cakes" on Monday, and she did well with the exercises in Reading Detective for the remainder of the week. Dictation kind of dragged along this week, but we're still progressing at least. She's about halfway through Little Lord Fauntleroy and read the story of "The Taming of the Shrew" this week.

Violet learned about questions this week for FLL. On Tuesday, we covered the actual question lesson in the book. On Thursday, we played a guessing game where we took turns thinking of an animal while the other asked questions to try to guess the answer. Violet's spelling is going very well. In cursive, we've made it through the letter Ii. I gave myself a challenge on Thursday when I tried to come up with a few sentences using all of the upper and lowercase letters that we had learned so far. I finally settled for Hi Gabe as the last sentence to get in the rest of my letters. I'll be glad when we go back to copywork. Scrambling letters to make words when sleep deprived is much harder than it should be. Violet struggled a bit more with her narrations this wee than usual. She is still reading Follow My Leader. Her fairy tale for the week was "Beuty and the Beast".

HISTORY / SCIENCE
In history this week, we covered the California Gold Rush and the Pony Express. The girls also read a biography about Buffalo Bill covering his life as a Pony Express rider. We assemble booklets for all three and added timeline figures for the first two. For map work, we drew the route of the Pony Express. The girls decided to label the oceans, the gulf, Mexico, and Canada on their own. I'm thrilled to say that Violet put the Atlantic and Pacific in the correct places YEAH!:) Jessie's history narration on Buffalo Bill sounded like one of her CW narrations this week. She insisted on including dialogue and everything. After one full page, I insisted that she be more concise. I'm considering having her write out one narration a week on her own after Christmas to start bridging into next year's work.

In science this week we covered currents and tides. I added a bit again in the section that covered tides. I drew the girls diagrams trying to better explain spring and neap tides. Then since I was still getting blank stares, we took a ball and put a small rubber band around it. I had Violet be the moon and Jessie the sun. First they both stretched the rubber band in the same direction to represent the spring tides. The they stretch it in opposite directions to represent the neap tides. It definitely seemed to help them.

OTHER

Memory work is going well. Jessie has finished yet another poem. Violet still has a few lines to go. I think I'll hold Jessie back to let Violet catch up. It will give her a new chance to focus on learning Psalm 121 before her Sunday school class starts new memory work later this month. In Latin this week, we were introduced to adjectives. Jessie was a little bit intimidated because she does really feel like she has a good grasp on what an adjective is in English grammar. The lesson focused more on learning the endings and making the adjectives agree with the nouns so it went well. No art or music this week.

BENNY'S PREK

Drum roll please..... This morning Benny counted up to 20 all by himself correctly!!! No hints required for 15, 16, or 17. His PP for the week has gone OK. He was also having some trouble concentrating this week. We're just going to review the consonant pages that we have already learned for a few days before adding any new sounds. Themes for the week were Italy and mice. Below is a picture of the mouse puppet we made this morning.