Week 15: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

OK, I confess. We didn't do so well in the schooling department this week, but to be honest I'm just glad that we managed to get the basics done. Monday morning was the third day in a row Benny woke up with a 103+ degree temperature. We crammed in some school work and then headed to an 11am doctor's appointment. I intended to finish up school when we got home, but by the time we waited for a chest xray (no pneumonia), an albuterol treatment (to help his breathing), and got his prescriptions filled (eating McDonald's in the van while we waited), I was too tired to even consider more schoolwork. Wednesday I had a doctor's appointment, and Thursday we ended school early to decorate the Christmas tree because I promised DH that I would have the empty decoration boxes ready for him to put away that evening. Friday, I gave the kids some extra free time to spend with DH before he left very early on Saturday for the beach to go fishing with some of his friends. Falling by the wayside this week were geography, history, art, music, and preschool. Here's what we did accomplish.

MATH
Jessie now officially likes metric units better than the standard US units of measurement. She breezed through the metric part only to get bogged down in the US units converting yards, feet, and inches. Getting math done for her this week was more a measure of perseverance (at Mom's insistence) than of actual math ability. I do want to make sure that she memorizes the basic conversions between units this year. I'm not quite sure if I just want to make it part of memory work or buy a simple workbook with some more practice to cement the facts that way. Violet, on the other hand, has been setting new records this week in the category of quickest math lessons ever while working through her word problems book. We did a chapter a day of 20 word problems in under 20 minutes with almost no mistakes. The one thing I love about review is that it shows me how much she has learned so far. I can remember her struggling with similar problems last year when she was working through the 1A series.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Spelling did get done for both girls this week. For memory work, we reviewed what was already in their boxes without adding anything new. For copywork both girls copied the poem My Gift this week. Jessie did manage to get in her Latin lessons. On Friday, we realized that we had forgotten to do CW Aesop all week so we did the entire writing project in one day including a key word outline, a rough draft, revisions, and a final draft (located on the left). This time in revisions we not only looked at spelling and punctuation, but I also suggested that a few of the sentences could be rewritten a bit differently. (She has become the queen of prepositional phrases lately.) We rewrote together one sentence that contained the word that three times, made another sentence a bit more concise by taking out unnecessary phrases, and revised a sentence with the work there appearing in it twice. Jessie seemed to be very open to the suggestions and did not take them as criticisms. My goal would be that by the end of the year, I could simply ask, "Is there another way that you could write this sentence that would make it more clear or concise?" and have her be able to suggest an alternative without my prompting.

So that's about it for the week. I was going to end with before and after pictures of our Christmas tree, but DH packed the camera away Friday before I remembered to get the after picture so I'll come back next week and add those in when the camera's back.