Weekly Report -- Oct. 31

Here's an incident that really sort of sums up the week:

Wednesday AnnaBeth and I worked on school subjects in the morning. After lunch and read alouds, I mowed the yard (bagging the grass clipping and dead leaves, and dumping them in yard waste containers), cleaned out the chest freezer, exercised, and worked on my own Latin lessons for half an hour. I was feeling pretty triumphant as I started supper -- wow, we had accomplished a lot! And it suddenly hit me that AnnaBeth and I had forgotten to do math! Never even crossed our minds. And it was too late, as after supper was 2.5 hours of dance class.

So, what did we accomplish this week?

Thalia studied algebra, Latin, Spanish, finished Alice in Wonderland and discussed it with me (using prompts from Lightning Lit 7), Earth Science, watched a PBS show on fractals, danced, played piano, and continued to re-read Eldest as a run-up to reading Brsinger. Also, decorated the house for Halloween, and cleaned quite a bit of it in the process.

AnnaBeth worked on First Language Lessons (finally got to diagram conjunctions, which is always fun), Writing With Ease (still using Five Children and It; this week we tried a French dictation as per Bravewriter), French, Minimus Latin, learned about the nose/smell, danced, swam, and played piano. And 3 (not 4) lessons of RightStart D math.

I read aloud from The Little Duke, which is now FINISHED. Also read aloud Five Children and It, and started Little Farm in the Ozarks (Little House, the Rose Years, book 2). The kids discussed the fact that we've ditched several read alouds, most of which were from Ambleside Online. I was trying to quietly extricate ourselves from that reading program and start something else. Sometimes you just have to admit to yourself that you don't feel like reading all of Pilgrim's Progress aloud in dribs and drabs over the course of several months, which is where we were in Ambleside.

Today we'll finish up odds and ends -- maybe do some more science, definitely practice piano. We will avoid reciting Edgar Allen Poe's The Bells, as it's been an earworm for me the last few days. Last night I kept waking up with the thought, "the tintinnabulation that so musically wells". I supposed it's better than having, say, old ELO songs running through your head all day. At least it sounds classier to say that you have an earworm of Poe's poetry than one of 70s pop music.