Week 7: Busy, busy, busy...

Overall, we managed to get the majority of our work done this week. Benny was running a fever the second half of the week. Jessie and Violet, I think, are just having a hard time concentrating. All they really want to do is go to the beach. (They have both made lists of what they want to take and ask daily if they can start packing yet.) Unfortunately, we still have another whole week of school before we leave. Here's our week:

LANGUAGE ARTS

Not much to say here. Almost everything is still chugging along fine. We didn't do much handwriting this week. That's partly my fault for forgetting to write something down in their notebooks to be copied. Violet and I are both struggling with FLL. It's not too hard just overly redundant for her. For me, I'm just not a scripted text person. I may take it with us to the beach and outline some ideas to make it more hands on. I think this will ultimately help with retention. (Jessie remembers none of the FLL definitions from first and second grade. I attribute this to a lack of built in review of the definitions and a lack of hands on work.) I also got Jessie's first request for a Christmas present. She wants her own copy of Little Pilgrims Progress. We decided to go ahead and finish reading the book now. We'll hold off on our next book until our second week in Jamestown.

MATH

Jessie has finished up multiplying and dividing by eight and is working on a few review exercises before tackling the nines next week. She still loves the multiplication part and hates the division mainly because she can't consistently work the latter problems mentally. We've reintroduced the multiplication flashcards from last year to start working on the facts that she isn't remembering with practice alone. I think memorizing the facts will ultimately help her ability to do the division in her head (thus making math a favorite subject again).
Violet has been breezing through the introductory section on division. I could probably pick up the pace , but I decided instead to use this time to continue drilling addition facts in preparation for the unit with adding and subtracting within 100. Mainly I just want to make sure that she feels confident about adding and subtracting before we get to larger numbers.

HISTORY / GEOGRAPHY

Still in contention for favorite school subject of the year, our US geography project is going great. We completed California and started on Colorado this week. I decided to give the girls an impromptu quiz on the 5 states we have learn so far. The results were mixed. Jessie has been building and rebuilding our North America puzzle in her free time and still remembers where all of the states are located. Violet isn't retaining the information, so I'll have to come up with a fun way to review with her. (Right now I'm too ready for a week of vacation to come up with any ideas.) We're still working on the Fifty Nifty United States song and are up to Indiana. I usually hear the song at least twice outside of geography. The link above will take you to a page where you can listen to the song and get the lyrics.

This week for history, we finished up Champlain and got started on colonization. We briefly visited St. Augustine, the oldest city in America, and then learned about the mystery of the Roanoke Colony. Jessie was appalled when the colonists were put ashore on Roanoke Island instead of being taken up the Chesapeake as they were suppose to be. Benny was a bit confused when the book was over asking me if that was the end. I guess he was expecting to find out what actually happened to the colonists. I had a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh that we didn't get too. Oh well, it's library day and Jessie is thrilled to have a new book to read this afternoon until we go into town. We added Sir Walter Raleigh and Virginia Dare to our timeline. For mapping, I found a map of Colonial America online. We added Quebec, St. Augustine, and Roanoke colonies this week color coding for the different nations. Hopefully, the maps will hold up until we get all of the colonies labeled. We finished our narrations today, so none of the booklets are made yet. We'll probably catch up on those Monday.

ART and MUSIC

For art this week, I thought we'd have another try at birds. This time I gave each of the girls a coloring page (from our geography work) with the picture of a cardinal. We talked for a few minutes about the different elements in the picture. Jessie worked very hard to copy the picture with good results. Violet kept trying to just slap some lines on the paper without studying the picture (maybe we should do art after lunch when we're not hungry). Once we started again and looked at one step of the drawing at a time, she drew a much better model. I think I'll try to find a simpler model for next week and see if we still have the same focusing problems. That's Jessie's red cardinal, Violet's pink one, and the coloring page model (colored in by Violet).



As far as music, we just didn't get to it this week. By lunch time, I was ready for quiet not a symphony of music. We'll try to finish the Vivaldi CD next week so we're ready to move on after vacation.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL
With Benny sick we only did 2 days of preschool. I figure we'll just pick up some extra books to read and finish up next week. It will give us some extra craft time, and Benny can spend some more time with DH on his days off next week "helping" get ready for our trip.