Weekly Report November 12-16, 2012

Ok, so I didn't really keep my promise of better, more consistent posts.  This year has just been CRAZY.  After my last post Lucas decided to scratch his forehead one night, a seemingly uneventful task, unless you're Lucas.  Instead of just his forehead, he ended up scratching his eye with his own finger, resulting in pretty much a gouge in his cornea.  That resulted in multiple trips to the Dr, as well as to a specialist at the medical college downtown.   Despite this little issue, we've been able to get some school done.  Between my last post and this November 11th, we'd done the typical schoolwork of math, penmanship, a little history and science as well as reading, writing and phonics.

This week started out great because Matt was home on Monday for Veteran's Day.  YAY, another teacher on site.  Matt helped out with any math questions and then stepped in to teach spelling as well as science.  I'm not sure that he'll want to help out with spelling ever again.  Teaching All About Spelling isn't hard, but since I've been doing it for a while now, I know the flow of it which makes it a little easier.

The kids and I had a pretty basic week for the rest of it.  After talking to some cool homeschool friends on facebook I've decided to shelve grammar for Everett and focus on writing and literature for the rest of this year.  Literature won't start until Jan, 2013, but he's looking forward to it.  We may do a little grammar here and there using a program written by the company that publishes his writing program, but it won't be anything on a regular schedule.

Here's some pictures from our week, I hope you enjoy them.

Ok we've done 4 weeks of school, I really better post an update.

Annika Clare's Owl

Yes I've been a bit of a slacker this year when it comes to weekly updates.  Part of that has been because we've been busy. Another part is because a lot of what we do is book work and lets be honest, nobody wants to see week after week of scanned pictures of worksheets my kids have done.  So this year I'm only going to put up pictures of projects and other similar things we do.

Everett's Owl

Like my title states we've been back at it for 4 weeks now.  The year is going ok, we've had to make a few minor adjustments to some subjects and put others on the back burner.  Phonics/Reading for Annika is an area that needed an adjustment.  Latin is one that got put on the back burner, but now that we're up and running we'll try to fold that back into the schedule.

Annika's Van Gogh

Lucas's Van Gogh

In These 4 weeks all of the kids have done lessons in math, phonics/grammar/reading, spelling, and penmanship.  Everett has done a couple writing assignments, one on Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot and one on Carthage.  In another couple of weeks we'll get back into his writing program and he'll start working on reports from multiple sources.  We've done a little bit of history, but our projects in that are on going, so I'll post pictures of that when we're done with the unit study.  We've continued on with the Chemistry program we started last year and have done a few experiments on states of matter.  We're now getting into density.  We've also done a few art things this year.  The first week we did a lesson from our Meet the Masters art program on VanGogh and then the next art lesson was just painting some cute ceramic owls.  Lucas opted not to do the owl project.

Everett's Van Gogh

I hope you enjoyed the little bit I've written about and I'll try to do more consistent better reports for the future.

 

Weekly Review -- April 9-13

Yes, I know it's been almost a month since I posted anything about our school work.  Honestly we've really just been doing math and some phonics/grammar so it's not really all that exciting.  This week we still kept it to math and la stuff we're wrapping up but we also did a few fun things too. 

Annika and Lucas doing lessons

Annika

... is now almost 30 weeks into vision therapy and is doing great.  Her reading ability has grown in leaps and bounds and she actually enjoys reading now. 

... has now completed Teaching Textbooks 4 through quiz 12 and is doing well with it.  

...we pulled the Explode the Code books back out and she's been doing great with them.  I think being able to read them easier, has helped her a lot.  They aren't as frustrating as they used to be.

Everett doing his math on the new iMac

Everett

... completed unit 6 in Junior Analytical Grammar on Adverbs.  Another bang up job on this unit with a "Mastery" score on the unit test. 

...has now completed through Quiz 12 in Teaching Textbooks 7.  He loves this program and is doing excellent work. 

Lucas

...has now completed All About Reading level 1 through lesson 13 and McRuffy math 1 through lesson 15.  He's doing really well with both.  He also started t-ball the end of March.  He loves it!

Kiya likes to hang out while we do lessons

The Fun Stuff

...we couldn't go bowling on Wednesday like usual because they were getting new carpet at the alley, so we went to a local park to fly kites.  It was super windy which made flying them a bit hard.  We ended up destroying two of the three kites, but had a blast while we were able to keep them up.
... Friday, Annika and I took our new fur-baby, Kiya, to a nearby state park to see if she liked long walks.  She did great, but we need to work on walking nicely on the leash and not trying to chase every single butterfly or dragonfly we encounter.  We must have worn her out because she snored like a moose on the way home. 


Flying Kites