HS Week Review 2/13-2/17

I’m changing things up already!  The list of completed tasks that I was posting was just too long…I’m glad I did a couple of weeks that way so friends and family could see what we do in exhaustive format.  But since I already keep records on my own I just can’t make myself do it twice, yk?  So we’re going with the highlight route!  I’m sure most of you will be glad…even I don’t like reading a whole post about reading x amt. of pages in our grammar book, doing lessons such-n-such in math, etc.

Highlights of our week:

1. Started off rather poorly, actually.  E’s been having trouble just getting the daily work done in a timely manner without complaining.  This is one of the downsides of homeschooling and not having peers around to ‘perform’ for.  It’s just you and mom and you don’t feel like it.  So you can schlump in your chair, answer with a sigh, poke and poke and poke, etc.  You get the drift.  When things get tough, the tears start immediately.  Again- it’s just mom.  No one to impress here! 

So we had a few talks this week and J had a couple bible studies on self-discipline, self-control and complaining.  I’ve also re-evaluated what we’re doing as each time we have some sort of ‘block’ I always ask myself if we’re doing too much.  And 9 times out of 10 we are.  I continually have to weed…when you’ve got one kid you tend to just throw everything you’ve ever wanted to learn or teach at the poor child and wonder why they don’t want to sit and school for 8 hours a day nonstop.  Ok- not quite that bad.  But still.  Bad enough! 

So this weekend I went back over my Homeschool Tracker software and rearranged items, freeing up some writing weeks so the programs don’t overlap as much.  Spread Science out a little more.  I would have removed one of the vocab programs, but the Building Language Lessons is almost through anyway, so I just pushed off our other one until it’s done.  Although E has been complaining about NOT wanting to finish that program…high praise!  We’re almost done with our regular handwriting program so that frees up more time too for the rest of this year.  There are only 2 health lessons left and I spaced those out further too.  I am combining the Writing With Ease into 2 days/week instead of 4, but we’ll be dropping the dictation exercises in lessons 1 and 3 that go along with the reading and summarizing.  Overkill, esp. since we have other writing programs.

There’s probably more, but that’s what I can remember right now.  All in all, I think we’re both feeling better about going into this week. 

2. We did manage to get about 70% of our items done last week.  The rest I’ve rearranged throughout the rest of the school year and the ones I haven’t I hope to have caught up by Wednesday.  The biggest catch-up will be in Story of the World…we can’t push that any later this year!  That's always been the area that we drag out-  there are so many resources we like to go through!  But we can’t keep doing that or we’ll be in Ancient History until she’s 19.
3. We enjoyed making our Valentine cards and projects this week for each other- we spent a few hours doing that on Tuesday.  We exchanged with friends during a playdate on Thursday. Here's a few pics of Emily sewing up cards and the like, and of my deck of cards I made for J.  I got the idea here.                                                                                                                                                                              
4. It was a rough end to the week as well- Emily’s pet rattie Silvermist died.  :(  They really are such cute pets, and so smart!  She was Tink’s bff too, and she’ll be missed greatly.  She came down very suddenly with a respiratory illness- Emily had held her Friday a.m. and when she brought her in to visit us, I noticed how odd she felt.  Lightweight and lethargic- not good.  We got an appointment at the vet for that afternoon.  They couldn’t tell for sure but diagnosed it as a respiratory ailment.  I verified that it was later on, as she got really congested (that’s finally what ended it all).  At any rate, she got some meds but it just worsened throughout the night and she died early Saturday a.m.  Luckily I was able to wake J up and get Tink out to be with her…she licked her and stayed close the whole time, chattering with her ears laid back.  Really sad.  :(  Emily is quite bummed.                                                                                                                  
5. We’d missed our Omni at the Science Museum to take Sil to the vet and unfortunately that was the last day Omnifest ran.  So we only made it to Shackleton.  We also skipped our monthly naturalist class as it was snowshoeing and there’s zero snow out.  I heard they still had fun, but we were finishing up our cards for people and getting a few things done after the slow start to the week and didn’t mind missing this month.                                   
6. Other highlights of the week- it was my sister Cassie’s birthday on Friday and we celebrated Saturday with a delicious meal and dessert (poppyseed cake, of course!) at Mom and Dad’s.  Had nice conversation as we sat around the table…never did crack open a board game.  We were all quite tired heading home that night.  I’d stayed up with Sil- partly to watch her and partly to fix my schedule; E was up later than usual b/c of Sil too and J had the post office that day and was bit on the leg by a dog!  He’s never been wary of dogs before this job and I doubt that helped!.  We zonked as soon as we got back.

Well- I’ve got lots of tweaking to do to this homeschool weekly wrap-up.  Who knew it’d be so hard to get the week’s highlights down??  I seem to have skewed the other way now and included lots of non-school, personal updates!  That’s ok though- in homeschool the line between school and home is quite blurred anyhow.  :)

Yearbook Page

Just finished this tonight- so proud of my photoshop maneuvering!  Each child at co-op gets a bio page to put a few fun facts/photos/etc about themselves.  I really love the idea and am excited to see how it turns out!  I blacked out our last name- that bar won't be there in the yearbook.  :)

That is all!  I've had a post on the back burner since Monday morning about our homeschool highlights last week, so we'll get that up tomorrow or Thursday.  I've switched things around already- it was taking entirely too long and was dull and boring to wade through- even for me!  So we're going with a highlight route now and we'll see how that pans out.

Some Vday, quilt, journal and misc

Quickie pair of Vday yoga pants from our favorite Kwik Sew pattern.  I went with a ruffled leg theme after getting distracted tracing and cutting one leg off at capri length!  Heh.  So I hacked them both up more and we now have yoga pants a la Matilda Jane.  Quite cute!  This fabric isn't the best choice for yoga bottoms...they don't have as much recovery and therefore get a little bagged out by the end of the day.  But we like them for around the house and for Valentine's Day.  :)  Plus, they brought back memories of when I first started sewing knits...she had a pair, same style with a white waistband that I sewed when she was 4.  Her dolly got a pair too.  I'm pretty good with that lately!

 


The cute tag:


Her doll also got a new hat, scarf and pair of socks from an old pair of knee highs that became ankle socks as the years passed for E.  Saw the tutorial on Pinterest- quite cute!  We tried tights out of another pair, but I biffed that by not accounting for the lack of stretch in a sock vs. the doll nylon-tights.  Next time!  :)


My favorite sewing site  was having their annual doll quilt swap, and while I was too nervous to sign up this round, it did inspire me to give it a go on my own.  J and E also cut out their squares the same night, but have yet to sew them up.  A few of these fabrics date back to late middle school or early high school when my mom was on her quilting kick.  I remember picking out a handful of fat quarters at a cute quilt shop.  The black paisley backing and the brown swirly squares on the front are from that trip.  :)  I also tried free-motion quilting!  Harder than it looks and I've got lots to learn.  I love the stippled quilt look though- definitely want to try more of that sometime.



The binding isn't too shabby if I do say so myself!


I finally remembered to take a few pics of my journal I made this last summer.  It's a smaller size as that's the size leather I had hanging around.  Quite proud of it!  Someday I'd like to learn leather tooling and/or painting.  The pages are hand-torn which didn't take as long as I'd thought it would.  The closure is leather and a little button I had hanging around in my stash.  There's a little bookmark of a few beads and a cross- next time I'd make it a wee bit longer so it wouldn't shut in the book, but would hang right below it when closed.  It's lined with felt.





Other odds and ends this past week?  Yogurt making again...this time I overcooked the batch by not turning the crock pot off when it was time to let it cool.  I just shut the thermometer beeper off and set the time for the cool-down period and walked away.  Oops!  So this batch was quite runny.  Made great yogurt-fruit pops though!


And lastly- this was E's Vday gift from us this year.  We don't usually do large gifts, but we'd gotten this off Zulily about a month ago and couldn't wait until her bday.  It's to replace 3 dress-up dresses we had to finally retire.  She loved it!  She enjoyed swooshing around, dancing with her Daddy:
 

The next day, she spent most of our school-day in it.  Here she is curled up in the chair reading:


I'll have to post our cards and my gift to J later, I forgot to take pics of those before uploading this week!

HS Week Review 2/6-2/10

Hah…so much for getting this up each Saturday!  I have a feeling this will be normal…sometime during the next week I’ll be able to finally post about the week before.  I’ll continue to shoot for Sat. for the next week or two…otherwise expect the homeschool update post early to mid-week.

Bible

• Daily Bible Time: Started Psalm 12 this week and continued 1 chapter/day throughout the week.
• Night devotions J and E worked on Proverbs mostly.
• Monday Emily completed Chapter 7, Lesson 3 in Elsie’s Life Lessons.  This was called Faithful in Times of Testing.

Language Arts (I'll post our reading list after the other subjects.)

• Spelling Workout D (SW-D), Lesson 33.  She missed 1 word on the pre-test, so she completed her daily lessons, finishing up with 100% on the test along with 5/5 bonus words correct.  Yay!
• First Language Lessons 2 (FLL), Lessons 53-56.  Adjectives, adverbs, story narration and finding adj/adv in the piece.  Introducing articles.  We also made a cool grammar flipchart that we saw on Pinterest.  Should be quite handy!

• Writing With Ease 3 (WWE), Week 14 all and 15-1.  The reading selections were from The Moffats by Eleanor Estes and The Lemonade Trick by Scott Corbett.  We worked a little with direct objects following action verbs.
• Write Shop (WS) Activity Sets 3:5-3:8, 4:1.  Did Guided Writing Practice a few times (this is where we brainstorm using our Story Wheel, adding in all of our story elements to create a paragraph together on the board/paper/etc- wherever we happen to be working.  The week prior of WS she had written a rough draft.  This week she worked on self-editing her work with Consumer- her editing buddy frog (stuffed animal), checking spelling, organization, story elements, etc.  She added any extra details she wanted and changed some of her adj/adv/verbs to be more ‘powerful’.  The next day she worked on her final draft.  The day after that we created a Writing Skills Checklist together for future lessons which will help her to self-edit before handing things in.  The last day we started the next unit which is on journal writing.  We introduced the lesson and completed an activity page, along with a short paragraph- unedited- about a personal memory.

• Building Language Lessons (BLL), pages 114-121. This week we finished up the stem port and were introduced to dis.
• Red Hot Root Words- Book 1, Grades 3-5 (RHRW), page 32.  This was a review week of ex, anti, contra and counter. 
• Presidential Penmanship 4 (PP), lesson 80. 
• Zaner Bloser Handwriting 3 (ZB), pages 146-151. 

Math

• Horizons 3, lessons 56-59.  Worked more with equivalent fractions…seems to be doing well for now with that.  Roman numerals, subtraction in the thousands, shapes 2 and 3d, decimals (tenths), what a bushel/peck/gallon is (I will not require her to remember this!), measurements, simple division, writing word problems, place value in ten thousands, equivalent equations with +, -, x; even/odd numbers, 4 number addition problems in the hundreds (that equal in the thousands) and word problems.   
• Singapore Primary Mathematics 2A (SM), week 12-A.  Lessons 56-58.  Worked on division- grouping, sharing, multiplication and division sentences and then practice.  We did not finish week 12 and moved it to this week.
• Math games- We did another math fun-reading book or two on fractions, as well as a critical thinking worksheet mid-week.

History/Geography 

• Story of the World Ancients (SOTW).  We finished chapter 21- The Medes and the Persians/Cyrus the Great.  We made and played our Conquer Mesopotamia board game- cute and fun!  Emily and I made a ‘gilded plate’.  We also started, but did not finish chapter 22, Sparta and Athens.  We read the chapter, discussed and answered questions, read a resource or two, did our mapwork and cut out some paper dolls and stickers to use throughout the coming weeks.  She has picked them up to color and play with in between lessons this week.

On the plate is a drawing of the Trojan horse by E:

Science

• Apologia Astronomy.  We completed the rest of our Mars lesson- the volcano project, our notebook, reading extra resources.  We put the space rocks unit off until this week.   

Art

• Did not do our formal lessons this week.  Instead, we did odd projects here and there, like these cute bookmarks from Pinterest:

Health/PE

• 1hr skating class at co-op
• Abeka Health Grade 3 (Health): Lesson 6.  Fighting Diseases- talks about the spread of disease, prevention, cures.  Also a bit of fire safety at the end of the chapter.

Co-op/Field Trips/Etc

• Wednesday was co-op.  We had science (Botany), lunch, then skating.  Botany was about seed dispersal- lots of fun with dandelion seeds and maple helicopters whizzing around the room, burr throwing, etc.  Skating was fun too- another gorgeous day for it.

Other

• Monday morning Emily got her stitches out.  Looking good!

Books Read  (I don't always catch everything she's picked up throughout the week, but assigned books, library books and ones I see her reading that she hasn't read before, etc I try to write down)

• Greek Mythology, Teachers Vid Co, DVD
• The Isles of Greece and Crete, World Life International, DVD
• Theseus and the Minotaur: Greek Mythology for Students, Schlessinger, DVD
• Ancient Persia, Neil Bramwell
• Fraction Fun, David Adler
• Ali and the Magic Stew, Shulamith Levey Oppenheim
• Mr. Semolina-Semolinus, Anthony L. Manna
• Wholey Cow: Fractions are Fun, Taryn Souders
• Fraction Action, Loreen Leedy
• Appples: How They Grow, Bruce McMillan
• Oliver’s Fruit Salad, Vivian French
• From Blossom to Fruit, Gail Saunders-Smith
• Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden, George Levenson
• Flowers Fruits and Seeds, Jerome Walker
• The Persian Empire, Karen Zeinert

That wraps up our week! 

Chocolate and Pink

No, my Christmas tree is not up!  This was from a few weeks ago.  :)

I bought this fabric a year or two ago from Chez Ami.  I love that it coordinates, but not overly so.

Sorry- the first pic is a bit grainy as it's a phone pic.  It's my favorite of the bunch though with her smile- she'd just gotten the matchy doll dress/tunic.  I made the leggings later to go with.  She has a white shirt underneath...too cold in MN for short sleeves this time of year!
 
I had seen a Hello Kitty dress at Target with the ruched elastic waist and the kimono-like sleeve (not set-in).  I decided I wanted to try it out and it worked pretty well! 
 
Next time I'd lower the sleeve a little more, and give a bit more ease in the elastic.  I tend to cinch things up a bit much as I don't want it floppy.  It fits fine now, but I'm thinking it will be too small next year and I like things to fit for a long time!

I made the leggings slightly cropped like her Lands End ones.  I made them with plenty of growing room too...I don't know why as she tends to wear the knees out in a year of regular wear.

My serger sure speeds things along for me!  I cut and sewed this dress, the leggings and the doll outfit in an evening with interruptions- not too shabby!  Now a coverstitch...that's my next wishlisted item to save up for.  Nothing could stop me then!

I whipped up another 4 pairs of the same style of leggings.  These ones are full length or more.  The brown and pink are cotton/lycra, the grey is mostly bamboo with cotton and lycra (so soft...almost pj-like as leggings, actually) and the white is a thinner c/l.  Not the most practical, but they're meant for under skirts.  They have a bit of ruching at the side and a double lace hem.  I'll be getting an outfit shot of a skirt I made for her sometime here and will get a closeup of that pair.

As you can see, the grey and white have lots of growing room, but since they're tighter leggings, they tend to pool about the ankles and aren't in the way.

I made J a quick headband to keep his ears warm on his route after measuring mine.  This was a tester one...I'll need to get a little black fleece so the gals at the post office and the kids in the hallway here stop teasing him about his dogpaw 'hat' that's missing it's top, lol!  His fault for losing his old one!  :D


Another thing we've started lately is making our own yogurt!  It's soooo good! 

Ours takes a little longer to heat and cool.  We also wrapped it last time in the oven with the heating pad (heated, then unplugged) and a rice bag.  Seemed to come out the same though.  It's a wee bit runny for our 'greek' yogurt, but still thicker than regular.  We strained it to thicken it up a bit more and are messing with the temps and whatnot a bit to get the perfect batch.  Someone mentioned a bit of dried milk powder so we might try that too.  At any rate- the recipe is delicious as is!  We drizzle a little honey or caramel on it to sweeten it at times for a little dessert.  Or add fruit for lunch.  It's good alone too- never thought I'd say that about yogurt!

 I'm making another batch today...it goes quick here!