Weekly Report

We had a pretty good week. Not our best but not our worst by a long shot.

Henry :

I did something new with Henry this week. Typically, we do language arts first thing in the morning which consists of one or two lessons from First Language Lessons and then some copy work which also serves as our printing practice. Then he might have a break or we do our read-aloud (typically based on the history we're learning) and then he has a break. Then he'll come back and do history or science depending upon the day and then break for lunch and then math. Based on the experience of other homeschoolers from an online community, I cut out the morning breaks and just powered through all subjects until we were finished. This typically takes 1.5 to 2 hours. Remember, part of his time is spent listening to me read and then doing coloring and map work so its not 2 hours of instruction. This now means that instead of his school day ending at 1:oo or 1:30 he is done no later than 11:00 am. Not to mention that it just works better for everyone. He is more focused with fewer breaks and with less moving back and forth between kids everything is more streamlined.

He started learning pronouns this week and memorized his poem, "Mice" by Rose Fyleman. We read from "God's People: Stories From the Old Testament" retold by Geraldine McCaughrean (see what we're reading in the sidebar for all titles in this post), specifically the Jacob stories up to Joseph. Some of these stories are highly nuanced with adult themes so even with the cool pictures they didn't catch his interest and we struggled with that. We did look at different artists' renderings of the sacrifice of Isaac which interested me him. We also read, "The Golden Sandal: A Middle Eastern Cinderella Story". He liked this one a lot.

In history he read about Hammurabi from Babylon and Shamshi-Adad from Assur. He didn't love either of these units but seemed to understand the contrast between the two ruling styles. He only did one narration for history this week:

Hammurabi was the king of Babylon. He wanted to make fair laws. Hammurabi was the first person to write down laws. He called these laws the Code of Hammurabi.

He studied otters and whales one day in science and monkeys and baboons on the other day. The only rhyme or reason to our animal studies is that we're covering mammals right now. He read from our text and watched some videos on unitedstreaming.com. He did narrations and coloring pages for each day.

In math we're trucking along with 3 days of Saxon and one day of Singapore. I did add a few Singapore Challenging Word Problems in everyday which has gone well.

Eleanor:

Eleanor was just not fully present this week. As a result, we struggled a bit. We like having the late morning and afternoons to work together with the new schedule. In the early morning she does her independent work: piano, cursive, spelling, directed reading.

She continues to diagram sentences in FLL3, this week adding adverbs and direct objects to the mix. We do dictation most days. Lately we've been working on poems. Just a couple of lines from the poem each day.

We did lesson 3 of Classical Writing Aesop, "The Crow and the Pitcher", which is going very well. I'm pleased with the program. Her outlining and retellings are getting really tight and controlled.

There was once a thirsty crow who found a pitcher with a little water left in it. He tried to reach the water but he could not. He almost gave up when he came up with the idea of dropping pebbles in one by one until he could reach the water.

Do things little by little.

In history she studied the Yellow River Valley and ancient Africa. She read, "The Ch'i Lin Purse" as well as various short stories from ancient China and Africa. We continue to read, "Little Women" aloud.

In science she studied earthquakes and volcanoes including short videos on both from unitedstreaming.com. She really got into both topics so a lot of time was spent on them. Math was fine. We only did 3 days of Saxon and missed our Singapore day although we did add some Challenging Word Problems each day.

We only did one day of French. Too many afterschool things this week.


Friday:

We looked at and discussed Goya's "Manuel Osorio de Zuniga" and the kids colored a coloring book version of the painting (in the sidebar on the right). Then we did some errands and came home and made Assyrian sebetu rolls which we used for our Assyrian feast dinner (grapes, dates, rolls, apple juice and grape juice...we added cheese to bulk it up for our American dinnertime sensibilities). The rolls were really good (flour, water, salt, milk, baking powder, garlic, olive oil) but Eleanor burned herself (not present again). While she soaked her fingers in ice water we played Othello and Go Fish.

I'm not sure what's going on with Eleanor. Maybe too many lectures. We sometimes get in these cycles of her being hard to deal with and us reacting to it which makes her anxious and even less present and we react to that and so on and so on. I'm going to try to back off and make sure she's having fun and getting lectured at a more reasonable ratio (which is why we played games today).