Weekly Report – The Good Week

Hopefully this will be a title that I want to use frequently! But after a very rough start on Monday, this turned out to be a great week of school for us. Monday was rough because  my oldest woke up with conjunctivitis which sent us to the eye doctor in the morning, followed by 4H, a Cross Country Meet, and violin lessons in the afternoon. Definitely a tiring day for me!

The bigger kids did a great job on all their independent work this week. There were no tears and a minimum of complaining. Hmm, maybe I didn’t give them enough?? (Just kidding)

My younger son hit a road block in math…Telling time. I was able to teach him to tell the time in 5 minute increments, but what he doesn’t get is the passage of time. For example, right now it’s 4:10. What time will it be in 5 minutes? So, I decided to skip this section in math for now. (That was VERY hard for me to do.) Today we worked on some calendar pages and he completely gets those. But on the positive side with him, I did see great improvement in his reading today. He is reading through the All About Reading books that correspond with All About Spelling (which I absolutely LOVE for him, by the way!). Today he was able to get through some of the sentences without so many L…O…N…G pauses between words. He also seems to have gotten the idea about putting spaces between words in a sentence and beginning with a capital letter in his dictation sentences.

We finished up our study of the Pilgrims this week. I took two weeks instead of one, but there was so much to cover that I didn’t think we had done it justice. We finished our read-aloud literature book, Almost Home, at lunch today. It is excellent historical fiction. I highly recommend it for a study of the Pilgrims. We also watched Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower, which we borrowed from Netflix. This was a reasonably balanced account, especially for The History Channel. (i.e. they didn’t make fun of the religion of the Pilgrims.) My daughter has started 2 of her colonial times projects: a fan and a cross stitch project. My son still hasn’t figured out what to do for his project.

I also taught my daughter how to make brownies this week. She’s entering them in the fair. I know that seems backwards, but I never seem to teach her to cook without some sort of deadline. For the last several years, she’s found something she wanted to learn how to make, entered that contest in the fair, and then I teach her how to do it. She placed with her peanut butter cookies the first year. Last year she didn’t win any ribbons for her muffins or cookies, but won a blue ribbon for her weaving project. This year she’s making brownies and a candle. We have already worked on candle-making for 4H so at least that is not totally new.

My son has a Cross Country meet bright and early tomorrow morning. I’d like to figure out a way for the whole family to go, but I’m just not seeing it. He’s supposed to be at the course (an hour away) at 7:30 tomorrow morning. Maybe we’ll come up with something.

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