Week 14 in Review: Settling Back In

We spent last week slowly working back up to our regular workload. We only took two days off the week off the week of Thanksgiving, but apparently a four day weekend is enough to completely erase the notion of morning routines and school schedules from the girls' minds again. Every time they finished an assignment I gave them, they were both convinced that it had to be their play with Benny time. (Although Benny didn't mind being so popular in the least). I need to tweak the schedule a bit anyhow to give Violet a full hour to work on her math. Hopefully I'll find some time next weekend after the Christmas decorations are up.

MATH

For the most part Jessie has worked fairly quickly through the section on length. We covered converting between both meters and centimeters and meters and kilometers. The only hitch came Friday when I left DH in charge while I went to my OB appointment. He apparently taught Jessie to add and subtract the kilometer and meter combinations by writing two columns, one for km and one for m. Unfortunately Jessie had a breakdown when she needed to subtract the meters but the second number was larger than the first. Serves me right for not explaining it myself before I left (although those McDonald's Cinnamelts I stopped for were definitely delicious). Jessie has one assignment left on Monday before finish her Intensive Practice book. She's still a little iffy on subtracting larger numbers, but her confidence is definitely going up with the review work.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Spelling is moving along fine for both girls. Violet decided that she was going to learn our newest poem, My Gift by Christina Rossetti, before Jessie. At the end of her afternoon quiet time on Tuesday, she emerged proudly to tell me that she had finished memorizing the poem and recited it for me. Needless to say Jessie was a bit taken aback to be beaten by her younger sister and had the poem memorized the next morning when we pulled out her memory box. I'm not thrilled with all the competition between the girls right now. I suppose I could assign them different poems to memorize, but part of how they memorize is to tell the poems to each other outside of school time anyway so I'm not sure it would help. At any rate, I don't think we'll move on to any new poems immediately. Both girls have some catch up to do in their Bible verse memorization for church. We only managed to read Little Pilgrims Progress one day last week, but I do hereby pledge to finish the book up next week even if it means reading it for the bedtime story. In CW Aesop, Jessie read the legend "A Laconic Answer". It's the first unfamiliar story we've done in CW so far. It will be interesting to see how the writing goes next week.

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY

For geography the girls completed Indiana and Iowa booklets. They have been singing the Fifty Nifty United States Song with each other. We'll try to get back to adding on to that next week. In history, we read in the Truthquest manual about the beginning of New Hampshire and New Netherlands (New York). I didn't have all of the books checked out from the library that I wanted to do for the week, but we did read the book Sarah Whitcher's Story on Wednesday and Thursday. It was my intention to do some booklets for their history lapbooks on Friday until Benny plopped himself in my lap and declared that he wanted to snuggle. He was interested in playing, reading, or even following DH around the house so I took his temperature and sure enough he was running a fever again. So lapbooks and map work will have to wait until next week.

ART / MUSIC Still on break.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

I had enough difficultly motivating the girls and keeping them on task this week that Benny's preschool fell through the cracks again. I did manage to pull down the box of letter magnets and add G, g, H, and h to the refrigerator. Benny was quite happy to match them up for me. Since the H and h were new, I pointed to the big H and had Benny say, "Big H," after me. As I pointed to the little h, he went running for the living room to find DH and called, "Little h," back over his shoulder. Oh well, we'll try again next week when DH is back at work and hopefully Benny is feeling better.