Saturday, February 7, 2009

Week 25: Progressing well while stopping to have fun

It's that time of year again. Christmas is over. I'm not planning another school break until the end of March. The kids are a little stir crazy from being cooped up inside because of the cold weather. Basically, the few inches of snow that accumulated on Tuesday gave us the perfect excuse for exactly what we needed. The kids got a partial break from school with some time outside. I just got a break in general from the routine. Part of me wishes I could say that I used my time productively and accomplished a few things, but the other part is glad that I decided to just relax and spend some quiet time with Henry instead. Here's a look at our week.

MATH

Jessie started the week with three days of review exercises. We discovered that our protractor has gone AWOL, so she got to skip a couple of problems. Other than a few careless errors, she did an excellent job. It's definitely reinforced my belief that things are progressing well for her in math this year. Thursday and Friday were spent starting a new section in the textbook and workbook on using decimal numbers in the four math operations. We combined several lessons here. Thursday was all about adding with decimals. Friday she had one last page of adding and the 3 pages of subtracting with decimals.

Violet spent most of the week zipping through the Intensive Practice section on table graphs. Truthfully, she probably could have finished all of her lessons for the week on Monday, but I don't want to finish math too early in the year nor do I want to get to far into the 3A book. Her favorite lesson for the week was again in the Miquon book. She outlined her hand print on a large grid at the top of the page and then had to redraw the picture on a much smaller grid at the bottom of the page. In fact, she enjoyed it so much that she did several similar grid drawing on the dry erase board late in the day.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie continues to be challenged by her lessons in SWO G, but she getting more comfortable with looking up words in the dictionary at the back of the workbook in order to correctly answer the exercises. I still think some of the definitions in the back are poorly written but have decided to simply give her my definition of the word when this occurs rather than have her lug out the college dictionary every time she does a spelling assignment. Grammar is also going well. We are still working on adjectives. Jessie is doing a much better job this time around at diagramming the adjectives although they do still occasionally end up under the wrong word. For CW this week, we have been working on "The Three Little Pigs". I've established a new routine for our CW that we will use for the remainder of the year. On Monday, we discussed the story. We noted the progression in the house building materials and the corresponding increase in effort on the part of the wolf in attempting to blow down the structures. We discussed and made a list of words to describe the wolf and each of the pigs. We also noted the progression of requests and frustration on the part of the wolf in trying to trick the third pig out of his house. Tuesday and Wednesday I had Jessie hand write her draft. Thursday, she read through it and made spelling and grammar corrections. My plan is to take the weekend to type it up double spaced and mark corrections much like a student would receive in public school, give her a chance Monday to make changes, and then spend Tuesday through Thursday discussing any other editing changes. For reading she's completed Caddie Woodlawn and started back into Tales From Shakespeare with "Timon of Athens".

After a brief struggle with the i before e rule last week, she tested out of the lesson this week and returned to her normal pace of spelling. In our modified FLL, we completed our discussion of adjectives, began discussing interjections, and used the poem "The Year" for our cursive copywork. In reading she is continuing with Five Children and It. Her selections from The Blue Fairy Book included "Tom Thumb" and "The Forty Thieves".

HISTORY

We finished up Little House on the Prairie this week. In addition on Monday we read about and discussed the orphans trains. On Wednesday, we discussed some of the challenges to living on the Great Plains and read about a swarm of grasshoppers. We had a couple of projects scheduled that we didn't get to because I worked on taxes instead of prepping the crafts. I think we'll just make next week a craft week since the library didn't have my books on hold.

SCIENCE

Only one day of science this week due to our snow play on Tuesday. We learned about sea snakes.


LATIN / ASL

Jessie completed the next lesson in LfC. We learned about the imperfect tense of sum. She's really enjoying the history reader. This week's sentences were about Antony and Cleopatra. We did some review of our ASL this week. The girls could both use a little more practice before moving on.

ART / MUSIC

For art this week, the girls drew rodeo cowboys from Levin's 1-2-3 Draw Horses which Violet received for Christmas. It was supposed to line up with a history week on cowboys but we're a little behind. No music.


BENNY'S PREK

Benny wanted to read about lions this week so we did. I didn't get to any craft projects with him either. His counting is going very well. We started counting by tens this week on the abacus. I think it should help him with his counting by ones so that we get up to 100. His phonics are going well. Some days are better than others depending on his level of concentration. We spent the entire week on one page doing either 8 or 12 words a day. I think he may benefit from doing two shorter phonics lessons a day, but I'm not ready to schedule a second one yet.

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