Weekly Report

Week 7.

One word: harried.
I'm not good with strangers in my home and this week there were three: two furnace salesmen (our furnace is quite obsolete and quite dead) and a fellow from the Federally sponsored Eco-Energy program (which may net us a $600.00 rebate on the furnace).

Highlight:
No breaks. I was frustrated with how long our day dragged when I let the kids go out and blow off steam. More than a couple of times they'd be late returning from the break because they hadn't done as I'd asked (clean the Guinea pig cage, get dressed). So, as a discipline measure they were not given a break either Thursday or Friday--the minute one was done one thing, I handed him another. To my surprise, it worked very, very well. One day we were even done by 1pm (except for grammar which got pushed aside as a result of all these appointments).

Spelling:
SWR, List L4. Dictated L4. The kids wrote sentences. I made up a worksheet on antonyms, homophones, homographs and homonyms for them. We quizzed L3 and counted it as the "test." The older had one error, the younger, two. (And this was after a fight about studying her words before the test.)

Latin:
Lively Latin: Lesson 9.2, Ex. 9.2, Lesson 9.3, Ex 9.4, Coriolanus, Ex. 9.5 and The Roman Legionary. For the most part, it went quite well this week. This is a page from the Younger:

Classical Writing:
Aesop A: Diogenes. We did a lot of thesaurus work with nouns and removed as many "said"s as possible.

illustration by The Older.

History:
Story of the World 2, ch. 31, Columbus and others. I took a slightly different approach this week. I had the kids do their reading on Tuesday and Wednesday before we did our work with SoTW. Retention was much better. Colouring pages, map work, review questions, one narration, and the chapter test.

Dictation and Copywork:
3x.

Poetry:
Didn't get a minute to introduce it. Not a problem. Jabberwocky will be here next week.

Bible:
1x (oops). Proverbs 6: 9-19. Though, I must admit, it's fun to say, "Wake up, you sluggard!"

Geography:
2x. Canada Map book, pp 20-23.

Canadian History Read Aloud:
Day 9. And I did it only because the kids were still awake and bouncing around at 10:00 last night. So, I got off the computer, made hot chocolate and had them lie on the couch. It was a wonderful discussion. I enjoyed how relaxed and "unschoolish" we were.

Math:
The Older: Singapore Math, 3B, Week 11: Fractions. Ex. 31-35. drill 4x. Here's what his drill sheets typically look like:


Obviously, they aren't timed!

The Younger: Singapore Math, 2B, Week 12: Fractions. Ex. 40-45. Drill 3x.

Grammar:
The Older: Rod and Staff 4, Lessons 22 & 23.

The Younger: FLL: Lessons 180, 182, 183. I'll be skipping great chunks of this, so we'll be done sooner than I expected!

Science:
We really didn't have a lot of time today, unfortunately. We read about honeybees from Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day and did up a quick comparison between them and the honey bees. (I never even knew bumblebees weren't honey bees!)

The kids have been reading all about honeybees, though, and the older did a "report" on bees as part of his required weekly "book report."

Art:
Next Saturday. The Provincial Art Gallery has an exhibition of prints from wood cuts by Albrecht Durer. How cool is that? On Saturday afternoons, they have an activity lead by a local artists to

Learn the techniques of traditional woodblock printing and create your own relief print.

We have to rearrange my son's music class to make it work, but I hope we can go next week.

Assigned Reading:
Older: 6h/week plus one book report or summary.
Younger: 3h/week plus one book report.

This is not going terribly well. I had incentives set up to be rewarded every three weeks. Last week the kids were supposed to qualify for their Week 6 reward. The Older did work fairly diligently at it and got his this week. But, he's still behind in "real" time. My daughter isn't motivated by a reward at all it seems.

Younger: 4 hours 15 minutes and 2 book reports behind.
Older: 5 1/2 hours and 1 book report behind.