We had a little meeting after co-op on Monday to talk about the rest of this year and plans for next year. Somehow I volunteered to run a book club for the kids during co-op next year. So okay then! I am thinking sort of Deconstructing Penguins-esque, except that there is a lot about Deconstructing Penguins that I don't like...so, you know, not those parts. I need the next Writing With Ease workbook to come out, so I can pick the books from the ones used for excerpts in that.
What else this week? It didn't snow. It was supposed to snow on Sunday, and it snowed in many places SOUTH of here, but not here. So Monday proceeded as usual, with no snow frolicking to speak of. This was a terrible disappointment, but we persevered.
I ordered a bunch of stuff from the Critical Thinking Co. that got here this week, and all the kids were loving it. Ari worked a lot on Building Thinking Skills 2. Milo's already been doing Building Thinking Skills 1, but I bought some attribute blocks for him, so he had a great time playing around with those. And I bought several preschool books for Gus, thinking they would get him through next year and that they, along with lots of picture books, would be a good preschool program for him. I don't think the books are going to last a month at the rate we're going though--he ADORES them. I think he's probably done 20 or 30 pages of the preK Building Thinking Skills over the last couple of days.
Milo's getting more enthusiastic about school lately. He was never resistant to any of it, but the past couple of weeks he's been saying more like, "oh--I love math!" et. al. My kids are all kinda geeky. I need to figure out a spelling program for him for next year; we stopped doing formal spelling with Ari awhile back since he's such a natural speller. But I strongly suspect Milo will be different. Other highlights from Milo's week: Singapore was all about 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. this week--putting things in order. Explode the Code and his little readers are going well. Next week I'll post some pictures of what they're doing, but tonight the battery in my camera is dead. Alas.
I had Ari work on his Intensive Practice book for Singapore this week--it was all about mental addition and subtraction strategies. He's getting more and more confident about the narrations in Writing With Ease; we're actually starting to have a bit of an issue with him saying too much--wanting to put in too much detail--which is the opposite problem from the one we used to have. We're going slowly through Grammar Island, and he's pretty interested (it's all mostly review for him, since he's done a lot of grammar already, but things are presented in a different way, so I think it's good). I'm still not quite sure how it's all going to look when we add in the other books in the fall.
More fall thoughts: I ordered Spanish for Children and Lively Latin for Ari for next year (I may start Latin earlier; not sure yet). And then I ordered Song School Latin for Milo, and I think I'm going to get Puertas Abiertas for everyone to use together. I also happened across a Muzzy Spanish set at Goodwill the other day, so the kids are watching that now. I need to sit down at some point and think about scheduling a little more; I fear it's going to be more complicated next year than it is now.
We had a lot of extra stuff going on this week, so history and science fell by the wayside a bit. For one thing, we had to finish the kids' costumes for Odyssey of the Mind on Thursday. The competition is coming up in 2 weeks, and it's unclear whether it's going to be a complete disaster or not. The kids are sorta completely nuts during the practices; they all get along well and have a great, but very, very goofy, time together. Either they'll pull it all together and rise to the occasion when they have a real audience...or they won't.
And then Friday it was really, really nice out so we had to go to the park for 4 hours :-)
The kids spend a lot of time working on their "Dragon Club." There are membership cards and everything. And Gus swings:
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