Weekly Report for August 19 to 23, 2008

Week One

"Road" by the Younger

"My Town" by the Older.
(See Saturday's write up)


I've decided that I must participate in order to be accountable for our work. I wrote this as we finished up each day, and sometimes throughout the day.
Our schedule is Tuesday to Friday with a 1/2 day on Saturday. (Dad has his days off Sunday and Monday).

Tuesday:

Bible Study: read and discussed Proverbs 1: 1-2

Recitation: Introduced "The Flies and the Honey Pot." Discussed unfamiliar vocabulary and re-told each stanza. The kids drew a picture.

Copywork: the youngest copied out the moral.

Dictation: The oldest wrote out the moral.

CW Aesop: Introduced the Princess and the Pea.

Spelling: Drilled phonograms and spelling rules. Only got half way through the list for K5

Latin: Read about Junius Brutus and did the picture study.

History: Read about Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible. (Ch. 22, SoTW2)Did the chapter test, using the book as a reference for the answers.

Math:
older, did 3B ex, 12 and 13
younger, did Review 2E. (from 2B) She finally agreed to use a few manipulatives for multiplication and division--beans in an egg carton.

Grammar:
older, Lesson 1, R&S 4
younger, FLL, Lesson 155. She had a lot of difficulty identifying nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs and adjectives.

CW individually:
Older wrote fist draft of re-telling the Princess and the Pea.
Younger--Didn't get to her narration.

Assigned Reading
Older completed his one hour. Enjoying "Seven Wise Princesses" retold by Wafa' Tarnowska, illus. by Nilesh Mistry
Younger completed only 15 minutes of her required 1/2 hour.

Evaluation: It was a long, hard and difficult day. We started at noon, and I was still at it at 7pm with the younger one when I had to quit and go grocery shopping.

Wednesday

My mom arrived to do their piano practice with them, so the order changed a bit.

Grammar:

Older--Lesson 2, R&S 4. The forms of the verb "to be" were new to him. I think we'll leave that for when we get to verbs and pull out the lesson in R&S 3 if necessary, when we get to it.

Younger-- FLL,Lesson 156. The script told me we had done conjunctions. Had we? I told my daughter that I think we'd been asleep for that lesson. She agreed. Anyway, we went on to articles which was difficult until I explained it the SWR way. (The "n" in "an" is just to help you say the word which starts with a vowel. The consonant is a "stop" for your tongue.) She did the dictation.

Math
older--3B, Ex. 14 & 15.
Younger--2B, Review A and corrections from yesterday.

History
Ch. 24(a) of SoTW2: The Ottoman Turks. This was a very confusing chapter, but the kids did well. I took down their narrations. My son wanted to add a few sentences so I gave it to him to do that. Then we re-ordered the sentences and I had him copy it out. He said it was shorter and was quite surprised. He was using pronouns! Nice things, pronouns. My daughter copied hers out.

Latin: Introduced Vocabulary D. They got into a fight over sharing a gluestick.

Inconsistency is the death of language study, so I've decided we're going to take the rest of the week and review ALL their vocabulary and chants to date. Most of the lessons this week are in history, so it seems a good time.

CW-Aesop.
Older--rewrote his copy from yesterday to correct for spelling mistakes and mechanics. He seems to be allergic to the dictionary and actually wants to look in his "Bone" books to find the words he needs to spell. What's with that?
Younger--took down her re-telling of the story. We included some dialogue at my suggestion. When I told her she could type it, she was quite excited.

Evaluation: We worked solid from about 1 pm to 6:30 pm. Another long, difficult day. Missed Bible Study and reciting our poem.

Then dinner and 1/2 hour of reading from both of them. Sigh. So nice and quiet.

Thursday

We got up with Dad at 6:30 this morning. That was too early! I let the kids watch TV (videos) until 8:30 and then we started with History at my daughter's request.

History: SoTW 22(b)
Older--wrote his narration on his own, without help though he was in the room as I worked on my daughter's with her. Surprisingly, he took great pains with his printing, punctuation and capitalisation. I was quite pleased.
Younger--Dictated to me, I wrote it down and dictated the first two sentences back to her.

Spelling--SWR K5--dictated list for the second time. They wrote the words on cards and alphabetized them.

Latin--reviewed Vocabulary A to D. Did Lesson 6.5They clowned around a lot during the vocabulary review but then we were all pretty tired by then. Doing the lesson was a slog.

Lunch at 11:00. Wonderful! Took an hour.

Bible Study:
Proverbs 1 (yes, all of it. We talked a lot about the "fear" of the Lord.)

Grammar
Older--R&S4, Lesson 3
Younger--FLL, 157

Math:
Older, 3B, Practice 3B
Younger, 2B, Review 2A

Evaluation: I was done at 1:30. (They still had their math and independent reading to do). I'm exhausted, but very happy--which sure beats exhausted and frustrated, as I have been the last two days. I don't know if we can start tomorrow at 8:30am, but this sure is nice.

Friday

Holy catfish!
We're up at 6:30am again. And they are reading. Reading! Not watching TV/DVD's as is usual. They wanted to. It's calm. Peaceful. What a wonderful way to start the day.

Spelling --the test. I'm going to have the eight year old redo it tomorrow.
Latin--Vocabulary exercise. Reviewed Vocabulary A-D.

Writing--Talked about the six rules of sentences and changed the type of two of them.
younger finished typing out her re-telling. She took 45 minutes but did a wonderful job. I told her next time, I would not use any punctuation as I wrote it. She immediately saw how challenging that would be and asked me to pleeeeease include capitals. We'll see.

Bible--Proverbs 2: 1-11. This is not going well. I'll have to seek some advice.

History--Ch 24(c) Sulieman the Magnificent. Also didn't go well. They seemed to blank out the audio CD. I'm strongly considering going back to rereading it myself. They may have just been tired. We did the chapter test rather than a narration. Perhaps that was the trouble?

Grammar
older-- R&S ch. 4 A bit bumpy but fine.
younger--FLL 157. Prepositions. I think the text is a bit babyish for her, now.

Math
Older--3B, Ex. 16
Younger--2 sheets of mental math. I had to sit with her and re-teach the techniques for subtraction. It was horrible for both of us, but she was getting it in the end. (I had to send her out for a bike ride in the middle of it to clear her head.)

Evaluation: I think I'll put down today's difficulties to our tiredness. It's been wonderful getting up at 6:30 two days in a row but we are still adjusting. After all, no one was in bed before midnight on Wednesday. (A long, rare, hot spell made it difficult to sleep, plus our habit of staying up late most nights anyway.)

Reading
younger--all caught up and a bit ahead.
older--still needs to do 45 minutes to catch up to today.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, though. Science, Art, Grammar, Math and writing a book report. And I must tidy up a LOT! We haven't done our poem all week because, ahem, I've lost their sheets.

Saturday

Again, both chose to read, first thing. Well, the older wanted to "check a few things on the computer" and after that he happily settled into about an hour of reading.

I am. of course, chomping at the bit to get to our art and science, but this is so great, I'm doing my best to curb my impatience.

My son wanted to continue reading, and after a half hour my daughter was ready to move on, so I gave her some super simple subtraction math sheets.

Art--
I presented Meet the Masters, Grade three., Portfolio A. (See side bar for link to this free program). Pieter Bruegel, The Harvesters, and Marc Chagall, I and the Village. The kids really appreciated seeing the larger web images!

Each of them wrote a little bit about the painting and the artists and did an art project using shapes to create a picture. (See above!) They really enjoyed it.

And that was that. Some neighbourhood kids came by to play and I let them go. We had a good week and we all worked hard.