Weekly Report II

Its been a good week. We got a lot done at a nice pace. Monday ran really long but because we didn't have to be anywhere until basketball at 6:30 it didn't really matter. Tuesday we finished up fairly early and had time to squeeze in a trip to Target before heading to our park day with the home school group. Wednesday was a little rushed with lessons but the welcome trade-off was a play date with good friends. Thursday was a surprise holiday. I'd forgotten that I'd planned for us to spend the day with friends who had a day off of school. We did lessons on Friday, our usual day off, instead.

Eleanor did two more chapters from Story of the World. She read the stories of Abraham and Joseph and did corresponding map work and narrations. We also covered Hammurabi and his code with more map work and a narration. Science was about weather. Spelling continues to be no problem as does language arts (adverbs and more sentence diagramming).

Cursive has taken a new path as Eleanor has requested ditching our plain but tidy script style for something more traditional and loopy. I downloaded a clever program that let's me print out practice worksheets using my own words and sentences in a variety of fonts. So now we can really overlap cursive with other subjects. Her practice sentences now reinforce other concepts she's learning. I can use it for Henry's printing and his copy work so it feels like it was a good investment.

We started our new writing program (Classical Writing: Aesop) which I had intended to alternate with the one we were using but I like the new one so well I might use it exclusively. We'll see. The new program teaches by employing the progymnasmata which are "An effectively graded sequence of exercises, from the simple to the more difficult or complex, from the concrete to the more abstract, that introduces speakers and writers to a genuinely rhetorical understanding of the invention and composition of arguments." In other words, blahblahblah blahblahblahblahblah. Give me a break, I was not progymnasmata'd.

Eleanor has even done 3 days of French. On a tip from Sarah I added an online component to our French lessons and the incentive of computer "games" in French has helped a great deal. Which is to say that she's motivated to learn French in theory but in practice she's reluctant and I can't blame her since its sometimes already been a long day by the time we get to it.

Her new directed reading is "The One-Eyed Giant", which she just finished and, "The Land of the Dead". These two are the first two in a series of re-tellings of "The Odyssey". She's really enjoying it. Her current free read is "Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand". I've started doing a read-aloud with her and our first is "Little Women". I have a coloring book that goes with it and I'm hoping to have it read in time to watch the movie this Christmas season. She also does some reading of picture book re-tellings of Middle Eastern folk tales.

Henry struggled a bit this week. He's still in a very grumpy cycle. But, he learned "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost. He finished his printing book. In history he learned about the Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx as well as Sargon and Akkadia. Our current read-aloud is Old Testament/Torah stories which he's really enjoying. For science we studied: beavers, raccoons, aardvarks and armadillos.

In other news, I have deconstructed the dining room/office by amputating the dining room part and I've turned it into the new school room. The whole thing was done on kind of a whim so let's hope I don't regret it. It solved a lot of problems. We no longer need a new kitchen table because the brand new barely used dining room set just happens to fit into the kitchen. Its a little snug but it gets the job done. I now have shelves and cabinets in the classroom and I'm waiting for a table and chairs, some bulletin boards and other accoutrement I've ordered. Pictures to follow.

Extra-curriculars:

M - E basketball practice.
T - Park day.
W - Play date, E piano, Halloween!
Th - Play date, E dance, E soccer.
F - H - OT, piano concert.
S - E basketball, E soccer.
S - E basketball, birthday party!