Weekly Report 2/12/10

Wow, I feel like we've had a normal week for the first time since ... I don't know, October? November?

In spite of the snow earlier in the week -- enough to go sledding, which is way more important than school work -- and in spite of Thalia being sick for much of the week -- which is part of the reason we didn't go see the Percy Jackson movie when it opened at 12:01am today even though the kids thought that seemed like a really, really clever thing to do -- the week just seemed so wonderfully NORMAL.

Maybe it's because, unlike the past 3 weeks, no one was here re-doing a bathroom. This means that we are currently sans bathroom on the main floor, since that one got ripped up and then the guy sort of wandered off, deciding he didn't want to do this sort of work anymore. But that's another story.

Anyway, what did we do with our bounty of normalcy?

First Language Lessons Level 4 -- back into the groove, memorizing Learning to Read by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (which goes nicely with our Civil War studies) and working with prepositional phrases.

Thalia continued working with Analytical Grammar. She's now working on punctuation in quotations. I keep reminding her that whatever she learns in this book, someone will be mightily offended by it, believing that end punctuation outside of the quotation close is a sure sign of the Apocalypse.

RIghtStart E is zipping by for AnnaBeth. She's currently working on multi-digit multiplication. Several of the story problems this week involved figuring out tile, which was timely since we were figuring out tile for the bathroom.

Thalia is in the world of polynomials in her Jacob's Algebra text. Let me pause to say that one of the smarter things we did with Jacob's is purchasing the purchasing the solutions manual on this page. It shows not only the correct answer, but how to GET the correct answer.

Both kids have been using the Mango language programs available online through our library's website. AnnaBeth is working on French, and Thalia is starting on the Spanish (which is all review right now).

Thalia's co-op Science class was cancelled due to the snow. They're going to continue on schedule, though, and use the extra "make-up" week as a bonus at the end of the course. They're working on astronomy right now, so most of it's review for Thalia. One of the experiments has to do with black holes, and is essentially the same thing she did when she lead the Space Exploration Interest Patch for her Cadette Girl Scout troop.

Thalia got back in the swing of Jump In Writing This involved finding the computer file with the last paper she wrote (about 2 months ago) re-reading it, and realizing that she didn't really like it after all. Thus we see what happens when we set aside a piece of writing for a little while so we can read it with fresh eyes.

Latin has fallen off the radar.

In History we're still parked on the Civil War. We really need to move past this point, as we have another 100-plus years to cover by next fall. Maybe when we finish up our current read aloud (Across Five Aprils) we'll declare that we're done with it.

i think those are pretty much the highlights for this week's school work. Today we'll be ice skating, or going to see Percy Jackson during one of the morning showings. Or maybe both. Either way, a good ending to a good week.