Week 1 in review August 4-8, 2008

Hi all,

Our first week of the 2008-2009 school year is now under our belts. The kids did excellent work and we have enjoyed everything we did. We were trying quite a few new curriculums including new things for Writing, Science, and Spelling. We also went back to our original Math curriculum which the kids were very excited about.

We've started doing some schooling in the late morning with an hour to two hour break for play and lunch. It's worked well. School is taking a bit longer this year because Everett is getting into some things that just require more time to work through.

The kids and I were really looking forward to starting school again and so far things are looking good for us. We are enjoying all the new things we're using and having a lot more fun.

No pictures of their work this week, since I already posted things from the first day (Scroll down to see that posting)
Here's the low down on what the kids did.

Everett:
Language Arts:
Completed 3 lessons in Growing with Grammar, covering things like plural nouns, possessive nouns, some simple sentence diagraming.
Writing covered some copywork and starting narration exercises. These came from our new writing program Writing with Ease.
Spelling, we reviewed our All About spelling phonogram cards. He did very well with this despite not having much phonics instruction before homeschooling.
In Phonics, he continued toward finishing the online program Headsprout phonics and complete 3 lessons. Only 11 more to go and he's finished.
He's continuing to work on Penmanship using A Reason for Handwriting, we'd love it if we could find a program similar that used things other than bible verses for the kids to copy, but this is the best fit for us so far. He's now starting the 2nd cursive workbook.
Math:
He complete 3 lessons in Math, which covered number sequences and recognizing them, as well as addition of lists of numbers and some word problems.

Annika:
Language Arts:
She started Grammar lessons with 2 lessons in Growing with Grammar covering sentence vs. fragment and learning about placing a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence
Writing was the same as Everett, they are working through the same level of Writing with Ease mostly due to my lack of finding a good fit for Everett in past years and because the level 2 workbook hasn't been released yet. She enjoyed the copywork and narration from "Little House in the Big Woods" and can't wait until we can read it as a read aloud.
Spelling was simply introducing the phonogram cards, since she's still working her way through the phonics program we're taking spelling very slowly.
Phonics, we've now switched over to Headsprout phonics for Annika as well and so far after 3 lessons she's enjoying it a lot. It's very fun for her and she's been doing really well with it.
Penmanship is also with A Reason for Handwriting. She's working with book B which is the second level of manuscript writing. She really enjoys the border sheet at the end of the week and is very careful about finishing it neatly.
Math:
We're continuing with Saxon math grade 1, she completed 3 lessons, which worked on learning the "doubles" addition facts as well as patterns, and sequences.

Both kids do history and science together. This week in History we started History Odyssey Early Modern Times level 1. We will be covering from the 1600's through the Gold Rush. The kids are looking forward to it. This week was simply the introduction which included learning about the continents and oceans. The kids have realized that they prefer me reading the "Story of the World" out loud instead of listening to the audio book version. Annika said the narrator on the audio book, "Sounds creepy" . I must say, I do enjoy reading to them, so I'm kind of happy about this.

For science we started our new NOEO Biology 1 course and the kids are really enjoying the reading followed by narration format. This week we started a 4 week study of weather. The kids enjoyed learning about the seasons and how the tilt of the earth helps determine this. They also liked the reading on the different types of clouds. Today we placed our thermometer for our temperature graph we'll be doing over the next few weeks and will be checking on our experiment about "the water cycle" in a few hours.

Lucas spent the time sitting in on the things he wanted and playing Bob Builder while watching the Sprout network.

We're now all anxiously awaiting the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics!

Hope all went well with everyone else's week.

Tune in next week for "Week 2 in review August 11-15"