Weekly Report--Sept 19-23, 2011

The new school year has begun.  It's exciting to begin the year, but we started later than usual because we were able to take a 6 week trip to the Midwest starting the end of July.  We got to visit with lots of family.  If you'd like to know what we were up to those 6 weeks you can see that at my other blog The Cackling Stump.
Here's what we did this week. I kept it nice and light, because I think it would be best to gradually get into the swing of things. 

Everett...

was happy that school was starting again, but was a little worried because he's now a 7th grader and knew the work would get tougher.  He completed 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks math 7, 2 pages in his penmanship book, 2 lessons of First Languages Lessons Level 4, part of Step 7 in All About Spelling level 3, and lastly dived in to the first lesson of the soon to be released Writing With Skill (the author, Susan Wise Bauer was gracious enough to send us the first 20 weeks as part of a Beta Testing of the program).  He really enjoyed the first lesson even though we had tested the program about a year ago.  I wanted to start at the beginning again, because there had been some updates and it's been quite a while since we had done the original Beta Testing. 

Annika...

also was happy that school was starting again and began our first day with a trip to the Vision Therapy doctor for her first appointment.  It went well and she's done her vision therapy homework without complaint this whole week.  She completed 2 lessons in Teaching Textbooks math 4, 2 lessons in First Language Lessons Level 3 (which she was excited to start), Step 1 of All About Spelling Level 2, and 4 pages in her penmanship book.  Next week we'll add her Explode the Code workbooks back in, she's still not done with phonics due to her vision issues, but she's looking forward to getting that resolved through therapy this year. 


Lucas...
couldn't have been more excited to start 1st grade.  He eagerly did 2 lessons in McRuffy Phonics and Reading K, 2 lessons in McRuffy math K and 2 pages in his penmanship book.  Yes he's using programs that say "Kindergarten" as the level, but they seem a bit advanced compared to some other programs to me. 


As you can see, it was a pretty easy week, but I didn't want to bite off more than we could chew right away.  The kids had fun and are anxious to continue our lessons next week.  We'll keep adding things in until we're at a full course load.