Weekly Report -- August 22

So, off to a slow start for the new school year.

Language

Thalia is finishing up Analytical Grammar. She didn't quite make it through all 5 lessons this week, so will finish it up next week. She is then Officially Done with Season 1 of the program, and will do small reviews until starting Season 2.

In the meantime, AnnaBeth got back in the swing of First Language Lessons. She has started memorizing the first 3 stanza of I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, and also worked on some oral usage skills. I gave her a placement test in Writing With Ease, and decided she needs more work at Level 2. She needs to work on narration a bit, as she doesn't much care for the idea of distilling an entire passage into 2 or 3 pithy sentences -- she'd rather embroider and expand rather than summarize. Also, when it comes to dictation she'd rather put things in her own words instead of writing down what was actually said.

Math

Thalia is somewhere in Chapter 2 of Life of Fred Algebra. She feels that some of the explanations could be better, particularly the explanation of why multiplying 2 negative numbers gives a positive. Other than that, though, she really likes the program. I'd like to get another math text for her to refer to when she'd like another viewpoint; maybe the library has something we could look over. I hate to spend the big bucks for a book we might end up disliking.

AnnaBeth spent the week reviewing multiplication. We'll move forward in RightStart C next week.

Latin

Minimus has been working well as far as holding AnnaBeth's interest, but it's pretty obvious that the vocabulary she knows was learned in Prima Latina. Too bad Prima Latina is so soul-deadeningly dry.

Other Stuff

Piano lessons, plus practice every day. Ceili practice for each, plus 1.5 hours solo dance class. A Girl Scout planning meeting that they were involved in. The season is starting to rev up.

Tonight AnnaBeth will have 2 more hours of dance, then we'll head out to check in for tomorrow's feis. It's here in town, but we like to check in ahead of time.