Weekly Wrap-Up: 4/2/12 – 4/7/12

We have finally found a good routine to our days and had a very good week as a result. 

I finally did a detailed Day in the Life post which can be seen here. 

Georgie started each day with Handwriting.  He does HWT alternating with copywork.  He is still having trouble with writing too much in capitals and he’s also gotten in the habit of putting lines between each word.   I saw an idea on Pinterest to use a popsicle stick to hold spaces between words while writing.  I may try this or a Lego for Georgie and see if I can get him to stop writing lines. 

Georgie is working through ETC Book 4.  So far he is doing an entire 8 page lesson each day.  If it starts getting more difficult, we will slow down.

This was our first full week using the Spectrum Reading and Language Arts books.  Georgie complained about the story being too long in the Reading but then said that the comprehension questions were too easy.    In the Language Arts book he is learning capitalization.  This moves very fast – just one lesson with each situation of capitalization.  Scholastic was moving too slowly but I may need to start using a mix of both to make sure he retains the information.

Georgie completed the basic Reading Eggs lessons this week.  Which I guess is a good thing since they took away the majority of our free trial.  He’s getting a lot of practice reading when he plays his other computer games (Toon Town and Minecraft are the current favorites) but I’m still working on ways to encourage him to read more books.

We did Step 22 in All About Spelling Level 1, which is on compound words.  He has no problem with the concept of compound words thanks to ETC and Reading Eggs but he was having trouble spelling some things he should know by this time (like desktop, he couldn’t remember how to spell desk).  So, I decided to do a review of everything up to that point to see if he had some area that he was weak.   He turned it into a game by collecting the cards that he answered correctly and putting them out in a grid.  So far he’s only missed a few words, mostly the difference between when to use k and when to use c.

Math Mammoth is still going well.  I’m not always having him do a whole page anymore if he clearly understands the concepts.   He’s starting to get bored with addition and subtraction.  He very clearly understands the concepts and how they relate to each other.  He doesn’t have all the facts memorized but we may move ahead while still doing some practice drilling.  We played a game this week using Addition and Subtraction flash cards.  I mixed together the two decks, split the result in half and stuck each half in a sock since they were printed on both sides (and Georgie likes to cheat).  We then played War where we each put down a card and whoever has the higher result, keeps the cards.  He loves playing games and doesn’t even seem to realize he’s working on facts.

He’s still enjoying his Algebra Readiness puzzles and his Math riddles.   He does one of each every day and they seem to be his favorite part of school.

His biggest weakness with math right now seems to be differentiating between the different coins and their values.  We covered a few pages in MM and I let him use real coins to show the correct values.

I also had flash cards from Oriental Trading that had various quiz questions about money.  Georgie enjoyed doing these and they seem to be helping him remember the values.  Daddy often gives Georgie the change out of his pocket when he gets home from work.  I’m trying to remind him to make Georgie tell him how much they are worth before giving them to him.

Vicki had another week when she wasn’t interested in doing much school.    She did play Reading Eggs and is up to Lesson 11.  I’m not sure she’s retaining much since when I watched her she was having a lot of trouble.  I think she advanced by continuing to try until she got something right.   Once the trial is gone, I’m going to try out PBS Island, which is now a free site.  She also plays Toon Town with her brother.

She did one HWT lesson, one Evan-Moor math sheet, one MEP lesson, 4 pages of Get Ready for the Code, one A to Z dot-to-dot.   Other than that she played with some letter matching activities, her wipe-off books, dominos, scale and unifix cubes and some wipe-off counting cards.   She seems to be having trouble with letter sounds which she’s known for years so I may step back a little and do a more intense review.

She got her hands on an orange highlighter and painted tiger stripes on her face and belly….

 

and evidently got her hands on my camera and did a pictorial study of our dog, Zappa.

 

We studied the inside of the earth in Science this week, which can be seen here. 

We did some Nature Study, which can be seen here.

We finished up the week by dying Easter eggs.  Vicki decided that her hands were good enough to use for putting the eggs in and out of the dye so wound up with green hands.

Next week will be a full week of field trips, Cloverbuds and a study of New Jersey.