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.  :)

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! 

HS Week Review 1/30-2/3

I've been debating for awhile on whether or not I'd like to post more homeschool related details here. I've read other blogs that post a review of what they've learned or done that week. I just read a few more last week and decided that I would give it a whirl.  So here goes!  I'm starting with last week, but I hope for future to have these up on Saturday.  I'm going to give abbreviations for curriculum we're using that I'll use going forward to speed things along.

Bible

• Each morning she reads 1 chapter of her bible.  She started Psalm 5 this Monday (she started in Genesis and is working her way through).  
• Every night one of us (usually J) reads her a devotion from one of our many devotionals we have.  Once a week it's our Veggietales devotional, sometimes it's Sticky Situations, sometimes it's a lesson on a character trait.  Other times we vary between seasonal studies, the bible, some of our children's bible items we have here, etc.  
• Mondays, the start of our homeschool week, she does an Elsie's Life Lessons devotion.  This week was Firmly Committed to God's Word...part of the Walking in Faithfulness chapter.  She read a few of the Elsie books prior to starting this devotional.

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

• Spelling Workout D (SW-D), Lesson 32.  We give a pre-test at the beginning of the week and if she gets 100%, we cross off spelling for the week after reviewing the rules of the lesson.  She got 100% on Monday, so we were able to leave that for the week.
• First Language Lessons 2 (FLL), Lessons 49-52.  This is our grammar program.  The beginning of the week was review in address formatting and writing postcards.  She's beyond this, so we skimmed and moved ahead.  We worked more with nouns, adjectives and verbs and reviewed some poems for memory work.  
• Writing With Ease 3 (WWE), Week 13.  The reading selections were from The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright.  In this program, 2 of the days she reads a couple of pages from our workbook and I ask review questions.  Then she summarizes the passage in about 3 sentences, capturing the main points or ideas.  One of the days, I write it and that's it, the other I write it and dictate a sentence or two back to her to write.  The other 2 days of the week, I dictate 1-3 sentences, depending on difficulty and she writes.  During this time, we also work in a few grammar items.  This week was helping verbs, direct quotations and semicolons.
• Daily 6-Trait Writing 3 (D6T), Unit 4-1, Days 1-5.  This week focused on sentence fluency- varying the way we write sentences by starting them in different ways, using different kinds and varying the lengths.  There are 4 days of worksheets where you might rewrite, correct, choose another way of doing something, etc.  Day 4 is brainstorming for the writing you do on Day 5.  Day 5 is writing...this usually ends up being anywhere from 1-3 paragraphs, from 7-15 sentences on average.  Perhaps sometime I'll scan and post some of her writing here.
• Building Language Lessons (BLL), pages 106-113.  This is one of our vocabulary programs.  I split lessons- instead of doing one lesson each week, I like to do half of one and half of the next.  This way we're working on each stem word for 2 weeks, along with periodic review that is built in with the lessons.  This week we finished up the stem post and were introduced to port.
• Red Hot Root Words- Book 1, Grades 3-5 (RHRW), page 31.  This is our other vocab program we use.  We focused on the prefixes ant/anti and contra/counter.
• Presidential Penmanship 4 (PP), lesson 79.  This is one of our cursive handwriting programs.  It's a quote by a former president- some tidbit of wisdom that we discuss after she copies it.  This is once a week.
• Zaner Bloser Handwriting 3 (ZB), pages 140-145.  Our other program which is more traditional.  We don't mind it, but at times I think we should drop it and move on.  I'm starting to require final work for writing and other areas in cursive.  We have book 4 for later this spring- I'll decide before then whether or not to continue formal handwriting curriculum or not.  She really does well for her age in this area and I feel like just writing in daily work will improve speed.

Math

• Horizons 3, lessons 52-55.  This is our daily work for 4 days of the week.  We take Wednesdays off and use that for math games and mind benders/critical thinking.  She's constantly reviewing and adding in something new every few lessons.  Examples of where she's at: working with $ and making change.  Comparing numbers to the ten-thousands place.  Beginning algebra concepts and equations such as n+4=(7+1)+5.  She needs to solve the equation on the right first, then isolate n by subtracting from both sides (even though I always want to use the term move across the bridge like Mr. Stanek taught us in middle school!).  She then inserts her answer into the equation.  She's doing multiplication up to 10, albeit not timed or for speed yet.  By summer we will be working for speed more.  She also has learned to multiply a 2digit number by a one digit number.  She does addition through the 1000's or 10,000s with regrouping and also works on adding up 4 or 5 numbers under 100 (like 28+32+74+61).  There's always a few word problems thrown in, or sometimes she'll need to come up with a word problem and solve it.  Sometimes there are sudoku puzzles for her to complete.  She works with Roman numerals through the hundreds.  Subtraction with regrouping in the thousands.  Shapes, weights and measures, etc etc.  Hopefully that gives an overview of where we are at currently.  We also have dabbled in division since last spring, but it's still very light.  No long division, certainly and most of our division is still under 5 (like 12/4, 30/5, etc).  She was introduced to decimals (just tenths, and very light) this week, as well as equal fractions.  I can see we'll need more immersion and visual aids/manipulatives for fractions- she's not a real mathy kid and I can see it on her face when somethings not clicking.  That's how I felt with those two concepts this week.  You'll see in this Saturday's post that we worked through a book on fractions to help with this.  Phew!  I won't normally take up this much space with our review...just new concepts or goals met/tests/etc.  
• Singapore Primary Mathematics 2A (SM), week 10.  We work almost a full year behind in this more mathy curriculum.  It's a lot of mental math and I like reviewing concepts for mastery and getting that solid base without the hair pulling.  She tends to learn traditionally at first...she likes to memorize facts and feel comfortable with just doing before understanding the whys of it.  I know that seems backwards, but I tell you- when I've pulled out the cubes or beans to illustrate a new problem, she just gets lost in looking at those shapes moving around in different piles.  When I try illustrating on the board for her, she'll get caught up in just going along for the ride that it seems easy until she realizes she wasn't really thinking...she was just watching.  Drives me batty!  So I like using Horizons- a more traditional program and then going back to the Singapore for mastery.  She's not afraid to tackle those concepts more fully when she feels she's already got a good handle on it.  Well...not as afraid.  It's still not her favorite subject!  So week 10 was about measuring weight- we have a balance from one of J's college chemistry classes and used that to measuring grams.  We talked about kg and g and then moved on to our own pounds, ounces, etc.  At the end of those lessons, day 5 (which we do a week in 2 days- on Thurs/Fri) was review.  There are reviews every 4 weeks or so of concepts learned so far.  She did very well and liked measuring with the balance scale.  Of course!  :)
• Math games- we have been playing cards and learning to add and subtract through the hundreds in our heads (with and without regrouping).  She did NOT want to do past the 10's and dug her heels in, but once she realized Mom wasn't letting her off the hook, she's been doing very well.  She's definitely the kid who has most things come pretty easily and therefore has a poor work ethic when she has to try and give it a bit of effort.  She tends to shut down if something doesn't come to her right away.  We're working on that.

History/Geography 

• Story of the World Ancients (SOTW).  This week, for some reason my Home School Tracker software hadn't scheduled this in.  Which was great for me as I felt swamped in library materials.  We were able to finish up a few lingering projects and weed our way through the books and vids.  I'll post the books/vids a bit further down.  We finally painted her Mycenaean sword, shield and helmet.  Unfortunately, when we paper mached the helmet it shrunk a bit.  We're hoping if we cut out a little of the inner support that it will fit.  Looks pretty cool!  The week we were working on though for reading and other was about ancient Persia.  Our geography is built into this curriculum.  We do U.S. geography informally on the side through games, etc. 

Science

• Apologia Astronomy.  We completed most of our Mars chapter this week.  It was fun to take a break from Botany...we've been studying that since late summer.  We did finish up our Fruits lesson from that on Monday.  Anyhow- we love space stuff!  Reeeaally need to get that telescope up and running!  :P  We left the extra reading, online links and the volcano project for this week.  J and Emily did do the edible Mars rover project (just a fun graham cracker/oreo concoction that looks like a space robot).  Yum!

Art

• Mark Kistler Video Art Lessons (MK).  Did a few of these- we like to do this as a warm-up for our Art time in the evening.  We shoot for Tuesday evenings, but many times it gets pushed out for one reason or another and we do it a different day.  We love Mark Kistler!  Easy, quick lessons but you still are learning and working with some art elements.  Since it's in a cartoon sort of way, it's low pressure and you don't worry if it doesn't look true-to-life.  :D
• Artistic Pursuits- Book 1 Grades 4-6 (AP).  We worked on our final day of unit 4- value.  Again...sometime I'll have to scan some of our work and post it!

Health/PE

• We've abandoned Stew Smith for now in favor of just getting out in the winter for a walk and focusing on 1 activity each week (sometimes those weeks are repeated).  Since we are skating in co-op for the next few sessions, we have been doing that for our own PE time.  We got out Monday for about an hour with some friends and again on Wednesday for another 45 minutes.  (Before she fell on the ice, cut her chin open and ended up with 3 stitches!!)  Anywhoo!  It's been good to get on the ice more...my feet actually started to relax in my skates on Wednesday.  

Co-op/Field Trips/Etc

• Monday afternoon we drove with a friend and her kiddos to the St. Paul Ice Festival.  Got to see lots of really cool (and really melting!!) ice sculptures.  I'd be so bummed if I took all that time carving a sculpture only to have it melt a few days into the event.  The squirrels weren't helping...chewing off pieces right in front of everybody!  You can always tell the out-of-towners from the city-people.  We're all watching the cute, cuddly critters and smiling at their antics while the city ones walk by in disgust.  We skated in Rice Park, right next to the festival.  Actually, the kids skated while the moms watched and chatted and took pictures.  :)  It was a good time to go too- not too many people out on the ice yet.
• Wednesday we met up with friends again for a skating playdate and lunch.  This is where Emily had a spill and got her 3 stitches.  She wasn't too horribly concerned about stitches or the doctor...just that we'd still make it to lunch.  Right, Mom?  We can't miss lunch!!  Yes, honey- we'll still have lunch with everyone.  :)  

Other

• Started a weekly journal sheet where you just write a few small thoughts or events about the previous day.  Saw it on Pinterest...my new favorite site!  Emily has a board there too- she loves finding things with me on there and that they go on HER board.  :)
• She's enjoying her box house- she likes to do her free reading time and sometimes her Horizons in there during the day.  J's given her a few notices 'from the city' about her lights being left on in there overnight.  One notice also for an inspection...it was getting quite full of art supplies, stuffed animals, books, blankets.  It's a box house, not a room!  :)  Memories!

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)

• The Wanderings of Odysseus- The Story of the Odyssey by Rosemary Sutcliff
• Myths of Ancient Greece in What Your 2nd Grader Needs to Know...edited by E.D. Hirsch Jr.
• Ancient Greece in What Your 2nd Grader Needs to Know, edited by E.D. Hirsch Jr. (also part of the art section related to Greece)
• King Midas and the Golden Touch by Charlotte Craft
• Ancient Persians- Myths of the World by Virginia Schomp
• King Midas and the Golden Touch by Demi
• Jason and the Golden Fleece, Schlessinger Media, DVD
• The Persian Cinderella by Shirley Climo
• Emma, unabridged by Jane Austen read by Donada Peters, Audio
• Esther's Story by Diane Wolkstein

That wraps up our week!  Hopefully now that the format is there, this post will go quicker.  Otherwise I may not keep up each week (I already track with my software, etc on my own).

Painted Ladies

All of our chrysalids 'hatched'...our first guy unfortunately came out before we had moved them and his wings didn't have a chance to grow. We call him Mr. Crumples...Fred is his first name. We've kept him- hill live out the remainder of his short life in our habitat feasting on sugar water carnations and melon.

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

The other four we let go after a few days...one particularly feisty girl cut her wing flapping around in there.

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

We were able to catch the very last one hatching- we woke Emily up and she was able to see it crawl out of the chrysalid and hang while growing it's wings. Took only a minute or two for them to straighten out...poor Crumples! The picture quality here is low...my camera hates indoor light and closeups. This sequence of pics show the guy just out of his shell and making his way up...see his wings straightening out? You'll also see in a pic or two a little black curly thing by his head...that is it's tongue which is like a straw that they sip nectar through. The red on the paper is the extra color from the wings of the other butterflies...they secrete any extra color after growing their wings.

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

A few pics of them in the habitat...they sit with their wings closed, but once they open they are the pretty much the colors of a monarch- but smaller. Most are blurry as the habitat didn't like the flash and my camera cannot capture action as well without it :P

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem

From jasarem