Week 31: Overcoming

It has been a very long week. Whatever virus Jessie had last week spread down the line. Everybody in our house with the exception of DH has been sick to one degree or the other in the last two weeks. Violet and Benny finally seem to be better, so now it's just baby Henry and I still a bit under the weather. My brain's a little foggy (mostly from sleep deprivation), but here's a rundown of what I remember we accomplished this week.

MATH

Jessie spent the majority of the week finishing off the section on operations with decimals in the IP. For the most part it went very smoothly. She had a couple of word problems that required some assistance. It had been a while since she had a problem that needed to have a bar diagram drawn in order to find the answer, but once I got her headed in the right direction she did very well. On the left is part of Friday's review lesson in the textbook.

Violet struggled a bit this week with the challenging section at the end of her 2B IP. She solved probably half of the problems on her own, and the other half we worked through together. Her Miquon was mostly a review of addition with carrying, but she did have fun with the square puzzles on the right, especially the one where she got to choose the numbers.

LANGUAGE ARTS

I think we actually completed everything on Jessie's schedule this week. YEAH!! In grammar, we punctuated addresses in sentences, discussed the proper way to introduce someone, and worked on direct and indirect quotations. Since we had covered the latter extensively in CW already, I let her just do the worksheet on Thursday and skip the exercises in the book. For dictation this week, she began a new section in The Silver Chair by Lewis where Eustace and Jill meet Puddleglum. A couple of the days, I was busy with a very grumpy Henry so she was allowed to read the sentence herself and then close the book and write it. For CW this week, our story was "The Gingerbread Man". The model was almost five pages long so I allowed her to rewrite it over the course of three days after reading and discussing it on Monday. Friday's assignment was simply to proofread my typing for errors. That leaves all of the editing for after break. She's close to finishing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and more than halfway through Lad, a Dog.

Violet also covered direct and indirect quotations in grammar this week and did very well on her spelling. She only did one day of copywork because we finished up the last page of the binder from last year. I didn't want to mess with a bunch of loose pages, and we were in no conditions to venture into Staples to get a new stack of handwriting paper spiral bound. She's still thoroughly enjoying reading The Twenty One Balloons. Her fairy tale for the week was "Blue Beard" and on Thursday she read The Paint Box Kid.

HISTORY

History this week has been light. We finished up Geronimo on Monday because I naturally didn't get around to it over the last weekend. I gave the girls a couple of fictional books to read about lumberjacks and their camps. We still need to do a bit of reading about steamboats and Hawaii becoming a state before putting together booklets. It looks like we'll do some history next week during break at least.

SCIENCE

We completed the lesson on fish. Violet and Benny have been repeating the word ovoviviparous ever since we read about sea horses. When asked what it meant only Jessie remembered. The other two just think it sounds funny. The only thing left to do for science is assemble the booklets, which can be done sometime next week as well.

ART
Another week of choose your own fish to draw. Jessie drew a pipefish and colored it in using every color we had available. Violet couldn't make up her mind, so she decided to draw both a clown triggerfish and an eel.

LATIN / OTHER

No lesson this week. We did some informal review instead. One day we did an overall vocabulary review. We also did some parsing and translating practice. Jessie did very well. I learned that I need to work on my English to Latin translation skills because it took me longer to come up with the sentences than it did Jessie to tell me what they meant.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny was off for the beginning of the week. I didn't figure he had the concentration to work on phonics while he we still sick. When we did resume phonics, we did our first pyramid sentence once day and spent two days working on the /k/ sound made by either a c or k at the beginning of a word. I know we started learning the months of the year. I don't remember exactly what we read this week because we didn't have a topic. I let Benny pick whatever he wanted off of the shelf instead.