Weekly Wrap-up

Georgie had a very good week while Vicki was not interested in doing much school.  Which worked out fine since Georgie took the California Achievement Test this week.  I still have to send it in for scoring but he did very well on the Reading and Math sections and not as well on the Language sections, especially punctuation and capitalization.  Not surprising since we have just begun working on those.

Vicki did a few pages in Handwriting without Tears and some Reading Eggs this week.  The rest of the time she played Toon Town or Webkinz on the computer or playing.   She has completed through Lesson 9 on Reading Eggs.

Georgie completed Book 3 in Explode the Code and we moved on to Book 4.  So far he says it’s easy but I often see talk about 4 being a big jump with it’s syllabication work.  We already have Book 5 so we can skip ahead and return to Book 4 if that happens. 

He is continuing along with Handwriting without Tears and with copywork.   He definitely prefers the HWT workbook to the copywork, and has returned to doing a random mix of upper and lower case letters with the copywork.  I may have to increase his copywork and have him redo it when he does it wrong.

We’ve switched from the Scholastic Grammar and Reading Comprehension to Spectrum workbooks.  We’ve just started these so it’s early to know how well they are going to work.

We are on Step 21 of All About Spelling Level 1.  I ordered Level 2 which we will start after doing a review of all the words in Level 1.

Math continues to be Georgie’s favorite and I’m continuing to try to find new interesting things for him to do.  He loves the lessons from Scholastic Algebra Readiness Made Easy: Grade 2 and I’m sure I’ll buy the Grade 3 book when he finishes this one.  I LOVE the Scholastic dollar sales.    At the latest sale, I bought a book of Solve-the-Riddle Math Practice: Addition and Subtraction to give him more practice with memorizing his math facts.  He’s very good with figuring out word problems and new concepts but doesn’t have all his fact memorized.  The pages consist of about 12 math problems with each answer associated with a letter.  The letters are then filled in blanks at the bottom with the numbers underneath them.  Each is the answer to a simple riddle like “What do frogs eat with their hamburgers?   - French Flies”.  Georgie loves riddles so I thought he would enjoy these and so far he does.

We did a lot of bird watching this week.  Most of the pictures were taken through the screen door and from quite a distance but we were able to identify quite a few of the birds.

We saw a red-bellied woodpecker…

our usual cardinals, bluejays, mourning doves, what I think was a tufted titmouse and some chickadees.

Earlier in the week we had the field trip for our 4-H Cloverbud bug unit.  More about that can be seen here.