Week 30: One step forward, another step back

It's been a roller coaster style week. Jessie spent the first half of the week getting better. Then just as Jessie was well again, Violet has come down with a high fever. I was truly tempted to just take the week off but decided to press on instead as best we could in order to take our break in two weeks around the girls' birthdays. Taking most of Friday morning off to do some consignment shopping didn't help either, but we're slowly trying to wrap some things up this afternoon. Here's a look at what we managed to accomplish.

MATH

Jessie completed a solid 5 days of work in her IP book in only four days this week covering over half of the section on operations with decimals. Her favorite assignment for the week was the magic squares pictures on the left where the sum had to be the same vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.

Violet also managed to complete a full week of assignments this week despite her fever at the end of the week. She has finished the basic part of the end review in the IP book. I think I'm going to have her try some of the challenging section instead of skipping over it next week before we move on to 3A just to see how she handles the work.

LANGUAGE ARTS

This was our least consistent area for the week. Jessie only completed one day of dictation this week. We did manage to keep on track with grammar. This week's lessons covered abbreviation, commas in a series, commas in addressing another person, and using commas with dates and addresses in a sentence. There was also a day for telling a story orally. She completed another lesson in her spelling. I decided to simply take the week off from CW. She's continuing to progress through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lad, A Dog reading another 6 and 2 chapters respectively. She's glazing over some of the science info in the former book, but is able to follow the basic plot nonetheless.

Violet was actually more consistent this week in her LA. She completed her normal 1 and 1/2 lessons in SWO. For copywork, we have started using sentences from Little Pilgrim's Progress which we read last year. We spent two days of grammar identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in various sentences that I selected from a story. We were supposed to learn about writing a thank you note, but I think we'll push that lesson off until next Monday. For reading, she's continuing to enjoy The Twenty One Balloons completing three more chapters this week. Her fairy tales this week was entitled "Prince Darling", and on Thursday she read The Chalk Box Kid by Bulla.

HISTORY / GEOGRAPHY

Our history lessons this week have been a bit sporadic. We started off well on Monday by learning about Custer's last stand. We finally still need to read a book about Geronimo, probably tomorrow right after breakfast. The booklets and timeline figures will get added to next Friday's to do list. Independently, the girls each read the book If You Lived with the Sioux Indians and narrated to me them portions which them each found most interesting.

We are continuing our geography drill twice a week although I often forget to include it in my weekly reports. Both girls are currently working on memorizing the states and capitals. The easier way we have found is simply to chant through them in a list. Violet is working on the capitals of Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, and Maryland this week. Jessie is a little further along and is practicing the capitals of Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and New Hampshire.

No Science this week.

ART / MUSIC

The girl's each chose another fish to draw this week. Jessie chose the lion fish. Violet chose the long nosed butterfly fish. No music done as yet.

LATIN

We completed the review lesson 26 this week. Jessie's translations were a little sloppy because she didn't parse the words before translating. A few of the sentences were in the wrong tense, and a noun or two was singular instead of plural. Rather than move on to a new lesson next week, I think we'll take another week to review and complete some more parsing and translating work which I'll have to put together over the weekend.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny completed four days of school this week. In phonics he practiced reading the words I and a in short sentences. My favorite was the last sentence that he read on Monday. "I hug Mom." I got a hug to finish off the lesson. He also learned the word and using it to combine to shorter sentences into a longer one. He's still working on his counting. I can't tell that we're making any progress counting by ones by I know it will click one of these days. On the up side, he has finally remember Thursday when saying the days of the week for two days in a row now. We didn't really have a theme for our reading this week. Benny had picked out an assortment of books from the library last weekend, so we just read whichever one he felt like at the time. No crafts either, since he spent most of this morning down at Grandma's house.