Weekly Report -- Sept. 26

As far as Thalia has been concerned, Language Arts this week has consisted of writing thank you cards. And the thank you cards have also counted as arts and crafts.



I think these came out really cute. It's wonderful that she has the patience to do this. I don't.

AnnaBeth has also started on her thank you cards, but had plain ol' bookwork to do, too. In First Language Lessons Level 3 she has started memorizing A Time to Talk by Robert Frost. I'm hoping this poem grows on me with familiarity; so far it's not one of my favorites. She's also studying prepositions. She had memorized a long list of prepositions in First Language Lessons Level 2 last spring, which is repeated in FLL3. FLL3 adds the concept of prepositional phrases.

In Writing With Ease we continue to work with 101 Dalmations. I've even found copywork featuring prepositional phrases. Yes, I'm pretty impressed with myself. And AnnaBeth is impressed with her increased ability to summarize a passage.

In Math Thalia has asked for help with several algebra problems this week. At first I thought she wasn't getting how to think through and set up the problem. Now, though, I see that she is doing fine with that; she just needs gobs of practice on those tedious bits about making sure to work through the equations accurately. I had a sudden brainstorm in the midst of this week that what she's doing in algebra (practice practice practice solving relatively simple problems that are all similar) is akin to what AnnaBeth is doing in Writing With Ease (practice practice practice writing simple passages).

And AnnaBeth is at lesson 144 in RightStart C, so near the end that there's a temptation to just zip through the remaining lessons so we can yell "DONE!" We are finally finished with fractions, finishing up with a game of Fraction War -- playing cards with fractions on them used in the card game War. Today was an odd lesson on AM/PM and the equinox. I call it odd because I thought everyone knew this stuff, and am surprised it's a Level C math lesson. We ended up discussing the Latin roots of things like AM and PM (the book suggested remember that AM means morning by thinking of "At Morning", which I thought was sort of dumb, mostly because it could just as easily stand for "After Morning" -- "at" is a really awkward word to use in a phrase like that, really).

We continue to learn other Languages as well. We're finally finished with fruit in French. We took a day off today before starting the next unit. In Spanish Thalia is learning about ser and also about gender. In Latin Thalia is looking at ordinal and cardinal numbers, while AnnaBeth is starting to learn about commands.

Science has consisted of Prentice Hall Science Explorers. We're currently learning about the Earth's surface. The PH Science Explorers tend to remind me of Girl Scout badge books for some reason -- I keep thinking we'll get a badge after we finish one of these sections. Thalia said she feels the same way.

Read Alouds this week have been The Tree in the Trail, Burgess Animal Book, Little House on Rocky Ridge (actually goes nicely with Tree in the Trail at the moment, since both are currently about traveling around in covered wagons), and 101 Dalmations.

Piano! Choir! Swimming! Dance! All of it done!

As usual, I'm sure I'm leaving out some major component of our week, but we must zoom along to other things this afternoon, so this will have to stand as our summary of what we accomplished.