Weekly Wrap Up (10/30/09)

Our week started out as a fairly typical week. Everyone is making good progress in their individual studies.

My older son finished Life of Fred: Fractions this week and passed the Final Bridge on the first try! (For those unfamiliar with Life of Fred, there are tests, called bridges, approximately every 5 chapters throughout the book. The regular bridges have 10 questions and the student must get 9 right to continue in the book. There are 5 bridges, so if the student misses more than 1 on the first try, there are more chances. The final bridge has 15 questions and the student can’t miss more than 2.) He did miss 2. I had him rework the problems he missed and the next day he started with Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents. The problems that he missed were, not surprisingly, the pure computation ones. I’m still in a struggle with him over WRITING problems down. Sigh.

My older daughter is doing well on all of her subjects. I started All About Spelling with her because I received it to review. I’ve wanted to try it for a while. I thought it would be a good fit for her, but so far it’s way too easy. I need to pick up the pace even more until we get to some problem areas. Her violin lessons are going well. She sounds good (which is amazing too me, not to mention a relief!).

Younger son is reading better all the time. I should probably say decoding instead of reading. He’s getting much faster at sounding out words. This week we finished up on -er, -ir-, -ear, words and started on words ending with y. He does well with the games and with Explode the Code. Reading in books is still rather tedious. He is showing a lot of improvement in reading the silly sentences in Explode the Code and he does seem to have good comprehension so that is encouraging.

We started reading By The Shores of Silver Lake. (I should say restarted. We read a portion of it last year while I was reviewing Prairie Primer.) I meant to finish it a long time ago, but it never happened. Now we’re going to finish it and decide on some associated projects, because it’s the topic of November’s Book Club meeting.

We started reading about primates in Apologia Zoology 3. I really appreciate how the author spends the beginning of the lesson distinguishing between humans and animals. We’ve covered the 2 sub-orders of primates and talked about the "wet-nosed" primates and the "dry-nosed’ primates. The dry-nosed are divided into New World and Old World primates. We’ve studied the New World Primates.

On Friday, my husband had the day off and we had the perfect opportunity for a field trip! So we went to the N.C. Zoo. We’ve been there many times in the last 9 years since we moved back to N.C. The nice thing is they are always adding new exhibits and redoing old ones. It was great to get a look at the animals we’ve studied this year, (a few from last year), are currently studying, and will be studying.
Here are a few pictures from our trip. It’s hard to narrow it down!

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