Weekly Report #2

It was a short week. In fact, it isn't over yet as we still have today to get through.

But I am quite excited about what we have done, this week.

We finished SoTW chapter 9.

We got caught up in Grammer with the boy and he pretty much has his diagramming of subjects and predicates figured out at last.

The girl is up to lesson 127 in FLL and we're now getting into dictation. She's handling it without any trouble, much to my surprise. She was so delighted with the fact she got it right, yesterday, she wrote it again!



I've got over my fear of Memoria Press's Christian Studies 1. The boy continues to astonish me with his grasp of the Bible. It isn't taking a lot to elicit some fairly deep thoughts.

I've switched back to using the Vos Story Bible with sheets from Calvary Chapel for my daughter. She loves this. She hasn't really gone through the Old Testament this way. (We used it for the New last year.) One night this week, she found that I had printed off new sheets--and all of a sudden she had to do them. Never mind it was bed-time! So, I had her Dad read the proper chapter.

Later, I asked her how it went and she pouted, "Daddy wouldn't help me."
"What do you mean?" I asked her.
"He wouldn't spell 'cursed.' He just sounded it out."

Oh dear. Teaching can really change the dynamic between the Princess and her Daddy! (Probably for the better.)

There are just two other things I want to highlight from this week.

My son and I continued on with Aesop A. This week we were to identify sentence types. I was frustrated with the instructions in the teacher's book when it told me to go back through the previous week's model to identify the different sentences as this week's model was written entirely in declarative sentences. What on Earth? I wondered. Why would they do that?

Then it occurred to me--ahh, it's easier to change them! So, I suggested to my son that we re-write Androcles and the Lion using different types of sentences and he was stumped until he took my suggestion to tell the story from Androcles's point of view. We had a great time re-writing it. I'll have to post it tomorrow, though, as he isn't finished typing it up on the computer yet.

Lastly, and most importantly, my son hit a wall with long division. I've spent a lot of time this week over at the WTM boards hashing this out. With the wonderful suggestions from the women there, we are beginning to get through it.


We did some physical exercises that involve crossing the mid-line (mostly a bunch of figure 8's and swaying our arms from left to right and from upper left to lower right.) I wrote his problems on graph paper and pre-drew the subtraction lines. I sat down beside him and worked on each question with him as he went along. It took us 30-45 minutes to do 8 questions, but they were done perfectly, and we "talked through" every single step.

We're going to do that today and every day until he gets impatient with me and just does it himself. I'm not sure the wall is scaled yet, but it is at times like these that I am so grateful to be homeschooling. What public school teacher could possibly have time to do all that? How could he hit that wall and not come away feeling (needlessly) ashamed of himself?

This is exactly where he would give up on school, if he hadn't already. When I brought him home at the end of Grade One he was already calling himself stupid and had zero tolerance for his mistakes. Let's hope he gets over this wall quickly, though. My daughter needs some intense one on one work for three digit subtraction with borrowing!

As for me, I started making up our spreadsheet to plan out the year. I have finally stopped fretting about how behind we are and accepted the fact that the work we have to do is just the work we have to do. I'm still fiddling with it, but I've finally lost the anger and despair I had had about our very long break last fall. So, we're on week 7 of a 40-42 week year. I'm just trying to do my best to make sure the load isn't too heavy during the summer.