Week 5: We're finally hitting our stride!!

It's taken 5 weeks, but we've finally gotten comfortable in our morning schedule. The girls know what needs to be done, what their choices are if they finish something early, and that dawdling around results in less free time. We even finished early on Wednesday, and they had half an hour to play outside before lunch. Here's a look at our week:

Language Arts

Grammar, copywork, and spelling are moving along. Jessie's enjoying R&S 3. Violet's getting a bit bored with FLL. (Not nouns again). We'll have to change things up a bit there next week or skip some lessons. For copywork they finished writing the poem we're working on memorizing, An Evening Hymn by Thomas Ken. That's Violet's printing on the left, and Jessie's cursive on the right. They have one stanza left to learn for next week. They are thoroughly enjoying Little Pilgrim's Progress by Taylor. We've been reading 4 three page chapters a day instead of the 2 I had planned. Thursday they were aghast when I stopped after 4 chapters. We ended just as Christian and Faithful were led away to the Governor's house in Vanity Fair. Even Benny joined his sisters chanting one more chapter over and over again. Poor children, I put the book up on the refrigerator so they wouldn't read ahead and made them wait for today because I needed to fix dinner. They survived.

MATH

Jessie worked on multiplying and dividing by seven this week. Violet's work is also about multiplication. Singapore 1B has a section introducing multiplication as adding groups with the same number of items in them. She just thinks it's cool to do multiplication like her sister.

HISTORY / GEOGRAPHY

We finished our Alaska booklet this week and started one for Arizona. Both girls are loving our state booklets. Violet declared that she wished she could keep "stickering" for at least two weeks. Jessie's reading Wish You Were Here by Kathleen Krull. In it, a young girl is traveling through all the states one summer and writes home to tell her parents what she discovers. There are two pages on each state with nice illustrations and lots of good information. It would be a great spine for a US geography study. I'm also teaching the girls the song Fifty Nifty United States. So far we're up to Hawaii, and they love it. I just have to be more consistent at remembering to do it.

In history, we breezed through Cortes, Pizarro, and Cartier on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday we read a biography on Hernando De Soto. The girls were disappointed that De Soto didn't force Pizarro to keep his promise to free Atahualpa. They wanted him to be the good guy. They were indignant and called him cruel later when he took Indians prisoner and forced them to carry the Spanish supplies after the Indians has treated him so kindly. Jessie thought it was sad that he looked for gold until he died and never saw his wife again. We had a chance how greed affected the decisions of the Spanish conquistadors and spent a brief time talking about how we should thank God for the blessings we have instead of always asking and wanting more.

For fun we made explorer ships out of card stock on Wednesday afternoon. I thought they turned out really well. Since there were three ships, the girls named them the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Here they are proudly displaying their work:



Preschool

Benny had a lot of fun with preschool this week. He loved going outside where we wrote our alphabet letters on the sidewalk and playing games with them. Not only did he have fun, but he also learned some letters. We're up from just B to B, b, C, c, and D. That just leaves A, a, and d to concentrate on the beginning of next week. It's been a great confidence booster for him. You can read more about what we did 2 posts down under Experimenting with Preschool.

I still need to come up with some more centers for Benny to do alone just after breakfast. Letting him play with water on Tuesday (it's mopping day anyway) has been great. He's poured, funneled, and made soup. What could he do differently this week? "Mom, can I have some bubble soap to put in here." He had a blast and even came back to play with it again before I cleaned it up for lunch. Here are a few pictures from this week.