Week 14: Too much on my plate

I personally had a hard time focusing on school this week. I've been trying to catch up with the housework, trying to figure out what to get for the girls for Christmas so I can send my Mom and sister a list of ideas (It's much easier to come up with ideas for Benny and Henry), and trying to find birthday and Christmas gifts for my sister's family so I can ship it all in one box before my bil's birthday next week.. The kids took advantage of my distraction a few times to sneak away from their work to play, which led to a few discussions about responsibility. All I can say is TGIF.

MATH
Jessie's had an easy week in math. On Monday she finished up the last of the Intensive Practice section on fractions. The remainder of the week was spent with data tables and bar graphs. Friday she started her first section of challenging problems in the CWP 4 book. Hopefully, she'll find the rest as easy as she found #16. In math drill, she's breezing through her keys very quickly. I think it might be time for some timed math worksheets. Once she is comfortable with those, we can decrease the number of days we do math drill to maybe once a week or so.

Violet is still in the money section of 2B. This week was all about subtracting dollar amounts. As with the addition portion, most of the subtraction portion focuses on mental math. There was only one day of stacking numbers and borrowing on paper. She's done an excellent job this week. Her CWP 2 book is also going very well. She's getting better at reading the problem and solving to find the answer when more than one step is required. As far as math drill, she goes through her flash cards at a decent speed, but if I ask her to do the addition keys instead, it can take forever. I'm not sure what the next step needs to be here.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Language arts has really dragged this week. I have decided that we are going to give up on the writing claw. Jessie's grip has changed, but it is still awkward. Instead, I've given her one of my mechanical pencils to use, which is fatter than the standard wooden pencil. As long as she is conscious of her grip, it is working much better. Hopefully, a bit of diligence will go a long way. Spelling and grammar are progressing well. In dictation, we've decreased our amount of writing in favor of focusing on her grip. In literature, she got the week off from Shakespeare because we had to return the library book for a couple of days. She's got a few more chapters left in Little Lord Fauntleroy, but should be finishing up in another week. In CW we rewrote King Canute and the Seashore. I'll add in a picture once I've had a chance to go back and make the corrections on the computer tomorrow.

Violet's cursive is coming along very well. We've made it through the letter L so far. Thursday, we reviewed by writing sentences using all of the letters we have covered so far, both uppercase and lowercase. Friday, I gave her what I guess you could call an open book test. Basically, I asked her to try to write all the letters from A-:L from memory. If she couldn't remember a letter, then she was allowed to look back in her handwriting notebook to see how to write it. I wasn't watching very carefully, but I believe she only looked back 3 times. Spelling is going very well. I've stopped writing out the words for her. She has been figuring out the cursive on her own. Grammar was dropped this week. Her reading assignments have been a little hit and miss since she has forgotten to do them a couple of days. We'll pick up next week and try again.

HISTORY
In history this week, we learned about The Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. The girls' biography reading covered Sojourner Truth. We did booklets on all three. We added Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to our timelines as well as four more presidents: Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan. The girls got the timelines put away while I was feeding Baby Henry so I didn't get pictures this week. I only have one more week planned covering Abraham Lincoln because I haven't decided how I want to cover the Civil War yet. I find that most of the books either oversimplify it too much or go into more detail of the battles than I want to cover. If we take Thanksgiving week off, that gives me two weeks to make a final decision and get something in place.

Science only got done one day this week because I went into town on Wednesday to do some Christmas shopping. Science covered water basically. We discussed the oceans and how they get supplied with salt and freshwater bodies and how they are formed.

OTHER

In memory work, the girls each have a new poem. Jessie's poem is The Parts of Speech. Violet is working on Mr. Nobody. Jessie is still working on adjectives in Latin with Lesson 12. Next week's lesson will be another review, and then we'll play some review games Thanksgiving week. For art they did both draw pictures of seashells, but I haven't taken a picture of them. For music, I'm still waiting for the book to come back in to the library.

BENNY'S PREK

After mastering, counting up to 20 last week, we moved the bar up to 40 for this week. Actually, the girls had already taught him to count from 20 to 30 so we just had to work on 31-40. Today, he made it up to 39 all on his own. In phonics, we have been doing a bit of reviewing before starting anymore new sounds. Today we pulled out his magnets, and I let him match any of the consonant that we have learned with any of the vowels. Then we tried blending them together. When he substituted a different sound for a letter, I had the letter correct him in a silly voice. He thought it was hilarious, and then was deliberately messing up just to hear my wacky voices. Not exactly what I had in mind. We did eventually buckle down and decipher 10 blends. The stories this week were from Germany or about dogs. The first picture below is the dog that Benny made all by himself one morning while waiting for Jessie to play with him. The second is the craft that I had selected for him.