Weekly Wrap-up: Jan 31 to Feb 4 2011

We had a really good week.  Not being able to leave the house for 4 days may have had something to do with it.  We had to keep busy or go insane.

I’ve made some minor changes to our days in an attempt to get a better routine for all of us.  I’ve started waking up before the kids, somewhere between 6:30 and 7:00 am is what I am shooting for.  Vicki usually gets up around 8am and Georgie around 9 am, so this would theoretically give me at least an hour of peace and quiet to enjoy a cup of tea and do a simple workout.  In actual practice, Vicki woke up around 7:15 twice in the last week.  Evidently she only likes to sleep in if its all snuggled up with Mommy.  I’m going to keep trying though.

Once everyone has breakfast and I’ve finished my workout, we start school.  I aiming for 10am or earlier.  We start with some exercises for the kids.  The purpose of this is really just to let some energy out.  Once this Winter is over and the snow is all gone, we will probably take a walk first thing.

Our first sit-down work is a literature unit and/or read-aloud.  I found that getting the kids to sit down and listen to a book is much harder later in the day.  If I do it first, it gets them into school mode and they are more likely to listen.

I planned to do a unit on Caps for Sale this week that I downloaded from Live Oak Media.  They have activity guides for a long list of children’s stories.   We read the story and I prepared to do the first of our activities.   But, the story was in the Harper Collins Treasury of Picture Book Classics and instead of doing activities, Georgie begged for me to read Harold and the Purple Crayon, then Goodnight Moon and then From Head to Toe (which we actually also have as a full size book of its own).   After all that reading, we ran out of time to do any activities and we never quite got back to them.



Georgie is getting bored with MEP math.  Though it has a lot of activities and puzzles in each lesson, it moves fairly slow (4 or 5 lessons on each number).  So far it has been very easy for him so I may skip a few lessons as we move forward.  I am thinking about switching to Math Mammoth when it goes on sale through the Homeschool Buyer’s Co-op in March.  It will be good to actually use the abacus again.

We are still working on Quarters in Money but we have moved on to time to the quarter hour in Time.   These are both going well.  I wouldn’t say he has them mastered but he seems to understand the concepts.  In Addition/ Subtraction, he knows all his facts up to 10 very well.  I think doing Place Value using Math Mammoth will help him continue to advance.

We finished Unit 9, short U words, in All About Spelling.  Georgie is still finding these lessons pretty easy but I think that will change once we are finished with the short vowel words (only E left to go).  I added his spelling lists to Spelling City and will be using that to “test” him once a week.  He is so resistant to writing that I want to find different ways to go over the words.  So now we have orally, with the tiles and typing on the computer.  He did about 15 of the words from Unit 9 on the computer this week.   He did his usual narrative while he typed “run is easy, it rhymes with fun….mug is easy it rhymes with dug”. 

I'm continuing to push writing lowercase letters to Georgie.  I took one of his lapsize white boards, drew widely spaced lines with a Sharpie marker and let him use that to practice.  If he continues to resist writing correctly, I may look in to getting Handwriting without Tears for him.

Another thing I’ve added to our days is time for Georgie to read to me.  He’s doing very well with reading and I let him pick from our selection of Beginner Books.  He likes these books a lot and loves to read them.  He usually does about the first 10 pages by himself then we alternate.  This week he read Green Eggs and Ham and Hop on Pop (both of which he can read the whole thing by himself), One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and Put Me in the Zoo.

We were able to do quite a bit this week in our elective subjects as well.

We learned about Habitats and Biomes.  More on that here.

Then we started our Continent study with Antarctica.  More about that here.