Weekly Report -- Oct. 10

Annabeth finished RightStart C!

Action shot of this last week:



The warmups for the week were to mentally solve equations, then put a cube on the appropriate number on the 100 chart. By the way, I don't have an official RightStart 100 chart (is there such a thing? I never bought the RightStart manipulative pack because I figured I had most of the stuff anyway). I printed this one off of some math website I found by googling "100 chart".

And most of the week's work involved tangrams. We've been playing with tangrams for years here, so AnnaBeth zipped through the lessons. Favorite moment: I was reading aloud out of the RightStart book that she was to make a triangle using 5 pieces, but please realize that this is the most difficult triangle to figure out -- by the time I'd finished reading the sentence about how difficult it was she was asking, "Like this?" and showing me the 5-piece triangle she'd put together. Least favorite part: Some days the triangles on the worksheet were proportional to our tangrams and some days they were not. I suspect RightStart worksheets are shrunk/expanded while printed, which is really annoying.

Also, she continued Ecoutez/Parlez (workbooks in the background of that shot).

We are taking a break from prepositional phrases in First Language Lessons and are working on Dictionary Skills.

In Writing With Ease we've skipped ahead to the examples for Year 2 Weeks 20-27 -- I think we'll park it here for awhile, as this is more challenging for AnnaBeth. The examples in the book use Five Children and It, so that's our current read aloud (we finished 101 Dalmations last week; coincidentally, Thalia found a copy of the VHS cartoon version at a garage sale, so we need to watch that and compare plot).

We're studying the human body in science. That whole scenario is a post unto itself -- what we're using and why (featuring bonus comments on Noeo Science along the lines of "save your money -- don't bother buying").

And Latin still is a matter of reading through Minimus. The highlight of the week was playing Simo Dicit (Simon Says). Somehow I have an entire page printout of appropriate commands -- no idea where I got it, though.

Thalia's math-of-choice is still Life of Fred. The bad moment this week was when she asked me what an abscissa is, and I claimed I'd never heard the term before in my life. Umm, okay, I had, but obviously it hadn't made much of an impresson. Later that evening Rick remembered what it was and that it was paired with the ordinate, but had the two flipped insofar as which axes they belonged on. Fred laid it all out for her, though, so she needn't rely on her parents for extemporaneous explanations of Cartesian coordinates (good thing, that).

She zipped through Spanish for Children and Latin for Children, studied poetry in Lightning Lit 7, reviewed grammar in Analytical Grammar Reinforcement, read a bunch of books (who can keep track?) and worked on mapping in Prentice Hall Science Explorer -- Earth's Changing Surface:



Shown here drawing continents on a grapefruit in order to have a hands on experience that a 3D planet cannot be accurately portrayed on a 2D map -- the idea was to peel the grapefruit and then squish out the skin in order to see that it had to be torn in order to make it flat. Mostly, though, we started a discussion on whether it was better to cut various fruits along their equator or their prime meridian, which conversation has lasted all week.

Read alouds abounded. Still reading Little House on Rocky Ridge and Burgess Animal Book and Little Duke and Understood Betsy (wow, we set that last one aside for a couple of months before picking it back up, but we all remember the plot line). And, yes, we finally finished Tree in the Trail. I don't know why I found that book so annoying, but, gees, I was glad to be done with it.

We're taking today off to get ready for another feis, so it's another short week for us. But we've covered a lot of ground in just a few days.