Weekly Review -- October 23-28, 2011

This 'week' worth of school took us two calendar weeks to get through because we had a run of head colds come through and then lots of appointments mixed in there. We're all getting very excited because Matt will be home for a visit in 8 more days.  It will be great to have him home even if it's only for a short while.  Here's what we did this past two weeks.

Everett...

Working on his Peter the Great paragraph

Completed pages 6-10 in his Key to Fractions book and took his first spot check on the Key to Tracker and scored 90%.  He also completed 3 lessons in Teaching Textbooks 7, and half of step 8 in All About Spelling Level 3.  He did 3 penmanship pages and I must say his cursive is really coming along nicely, he starting to use it more often then print in his assignments.  He also worked through week 1 days 2 and 3 in Writing With Skill.  They were tough lessons for him because he's moving from summarizing short paragraphs to larger stories.  He had a rough time with the day two assignment on the excerpt from Wolves of Willoboughby Chase but was super excited when the next days excerpt was from The Story of the World: Volume 3 and was about Peter the Great.  I was happy with the paragraph about Peter he turned in. Lastly he got braces this week and is very excited to have them.  He had pretty sore teeth for about 3 days, but says it's getting better everyday. 

Annika...

I finally got a picture of her. 

Has been doing really well is vision therapy and has begun reading me a picture book each day.  She's really enjoying the books and doing an amazing job in working on her fluency and decoding.  It so nice to see her being able to enjoy reading instead of dreading it.  The books she's read are listed on the sidebar.  Her book work this week included 4 lessons and a quiz in Teaching Textbooks 4, 6 pages in Explode the Code book 4,finishing step 2 and half of step 3 in All About Spelling Level 2, and 5 pages in her penmanship book.  

Lucas...

completed 8 lessons in McRuffy math, 6 pages in his penmanship book and 3 lessons in All About Reading Pre-1.  He's having so much fun playing the games again and doing the letter pages this time through. 

Art

I bought a huge bucket of air dry clay and let the kids go to town with it, they make a few dragon figures and then painted the.  They also helped me make our Angry Bird costumes for Halloween.

Weekly Report-- October 10-14, 2011

Well we finally made it through week 3. The schedule got a little off track, but we're still making progress and have a good plan in place for the next few weeks that works around some appointments we have coming up. Here's what we did this week.

We started the week by going to our first play, it was a children's theater show called Maximus Mars. The kids loved it and can't wait to go back next month for the next play in the series. 

Everett...

completed a lesson in First Language Lessons 4, which he apparently requires the use of his homemade Emu Quill ballpoint pen.

He also completed two penmanship pages, 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks 7, Step 7 in All About Spelling Level 3, pages 3-5 in Key to Fractions book 2, and wrote a paragraph about Whooping Cranes.


Annika...

refused to let me take any pictures of her working, so all I have is a short write up. She did an excellent job at Vision Therapy which means she got to drop two of her least favorite therapy homework assignments.  She completed 2 lessons in First Language Lessons 3, 4 pages in her penmanship book, 4 pages of Explode the Code book 4, 3 lessons in Teaching Textbooks, and half of Step 2 in All About Spelling level 2.  I also wanted to get her reading again, she's been a bit reluctant to read because of her difficulties and vision issues.  I remembered a post on a homeschool forum by a mom that mentioned she got her daughter to enjoy reading practice more by using picture books instead of leveled readers.  So we stopped at the library after therapy and picked up 8 books, she's read two this week and was so proud of herself. 





Lucas...
completed 5 math lessons in McRuffy math K and 2 penmanship pages. He was super happy to see Ziggy the Zebra from All About Reading make a return.  I dug out our AAR level Pre-1 stuff while we wait for level 1 to be released.  We went through this level before but he wasn't interested in the worksheets, so we picked those up where we'd left off.  He did the pages for Captial letter K and L and had fun playing games with Ziggy.  Here he is with his completed Letter "L" page.

All in all a decent week, now that we're back on track things should go much more smoothly.