Weekly Report

Despite a number of interruptions we had a successful and fun week!

Eleanor:

I think we are on our way to trimming the fat in her days and thus reducing the amount of time we spend on lessons. In language arts we continued to work on memorizing her poem and learned about the predicate nominative and the predicate adjective and how to diagram them. In history she learned about the Middle and New Kingdoms of ancient Egypt. She read biographies of Hatshepsut and Tut along with other books and watched some "film strips" (remember those?) Math was much smoother this week and keeping my cool really helped. In science she learned about rivers and floods. She got to watch a "Magic Schoolbus" show and we watched most of the fresh water portion of "Planet Earth". She spent a LOT of time on her illustration for this but she liked it so the time was not an issue. In writing she retold the story of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse to good effect.

New things we implemented this week: History Scribe notebooking pages and their Time Line. Both were big hits. I even printed out blank notebook pages to use for our science pages. Perfect.

French - let's not talk about it.

Henry:

Still chugging along in FLL...glad to be done with nouns. He is still enjoying Explode the Code although he's not *as* anxious to do 5-7 pages in one sitting. I'm fine with about 3 so it's all good. He hated simple cutting SO much that I, being the warm and tender mother that I am, added in simple folding! Wheeee! Truth be told, he has warmed up to both activities so there goes my fun. Math goes smoothly as usual. In history we covered the Indus Valley. He did not love it but he was sporting about it. In science he learned about dolphins & killer whales, rabbits & bats. He also got to watch a "Magic Schoolbus" episode pertaining to bats so all was well.

Susannah:

This 2-year old girl was so excited to start school this week. We just did pages from various Kumon workbooks. Tracing, coloring, stickers...she loved it. We also worked on letters and numbers. She's really got most of the letters and their sounds nailed which I'm hoping means that the process of teaching her to read won't be too terribly difficult. I've yet to teach a child to read so I'm nervous about that. When I tried with Eleanor it was an abysmal failure and I just let her learn it on the streets. Since then I've been gun shy about the process. Oh, Susannah also insisted on doing her "poems" which means she stands up and recites. She can recite "Work", "How Doth the Little Crocodile" and she considers "A noun is the name of a person, place, thing or idea" a poem so she says that too.

On Friday I really wanted to do a craft but we had to do errands. We did discuss another painting, "The Oddie Children" by Sir William Beechey:



So ends another week. Next week sees a number of unpleasant interruptions as well and I'm really hoping that that will be the end of that.