April 12-16, 2010

We had a really lovely week.  The weather was beautiful, the kids played outside enough, did school enough, saw friends enough, watched TV not too much, etc. On Tuesday, for example, I dropped Ari off at his board game class in the morning and took Milo and Gus to the thrift store, where I found the exact same Doc Marten Mary Janes that I paid $100 of my financial aid money for in college for $4.94! I had actually been missing them lately (I can't remember what happened to the original pair; I think the strap broke, and they likely didn't fit me anymore) and considering buying them from Zappo's for $75. Then we picked Ari up and came home. During the afternoon, we did a full day of school, watched an episode of Mythbusters, and the kids spent a bunch of time outside playing in the creek. And then of course Lost was on that night, so all in all it was pretty much the perfect day. Aside re: creek, et.al.  Despite my longstanding dream of moving to Roswell and being able to walk to the park and stuff, I'm really appreciating our little house in the woods this spring. The kids are finally old enough to really get into it (and to play outside relatively unsupervised (i.e. I can peek out the window at them every few minutes)); they're climbing trees, playing in the creek, making trails through the woods, riding bikes, actually using their treehouse....it's fabulous. I should have taken pictures!

We're moving right along with school. If we can keep up this pace for the next few weeks, we should be able to relax a bit for summer.  Ari's still on track to finish Singapore 4B early; he slowed down a bit toward the end of the week because he's doing long division with decimals. He doesn't have any real trouble with it; he just doesn't like it because it's tedious. Milo is still crawling through RS B, but I'm becoming more okay about that.  If he doesn't start C until the middle of next year, nothing terrible will happen. I've been doing lessons from RS A with Gus just sort of whenever he asks for one, so we're probably averaging 2 a week or so.

Gus' reading has really taken off. We were geocaching a few days ago, and he read "Great! You are welcome..." unprompted off the note inside the geocache (it ends with "...to join us," but he'd lost interest by then). I think, like Ari before him, he's an excellent guesser and has a great visual memory for words, so he can combine those skills with his still rudimentary knowledge of phonics and get pretty far. We're doing the lessons from McRuffy phonics nearly every day, and he's enjoying them.

Milo is working through Explode the Code 4  and should be able to finish that by summer.  He's reading more Level 2 I Can Read books--Arthur's Campout is this week's selection. And I suddenly remembered that we have these Aesop's Fables books from Royal Fireworks Press (well, actually, we only have the first one), so I pulled that out and did some of it with him.  It's a really fun little book; it has a short fable (easy enough that Milo can read it himself) and then it uses the fable for a few activities that teach about a particular concept like nouns or verbs or...well, so far we've only gotten to nouns and verbs.  I think it's going to be a nice precursor to MCT stuff in a couple of years, since we've left FLL behind.

All three kids are having a great time with IEW's poetry memorization program. We've done the first four poems.  I didn't buy the CD, because it was SO expensive (and, umm, I kind of can't stand to listen to Andrew Pudewa), but I've been regretting it, because it would be so easy to listen to it in the car. I thought about seeing if I could order just the CD, but now I think we've decided that Dave is going to record the poems and put them on a CD for us (because I definitely can't stand to listen to myself read them over and over!)

We're moving into the Great Depression with history--reading a biography of FDR, Rose's Journal: The Story of a Girl in the Great Depression, and looking at pictures from Children of the Great Depression.

Dave and the kids are back from picking up our lawnmower, so I will wrap things up now.  Next week will be a weird week because Dave's sister will be in town, so we'll do lots of stuff with her and less stuff at home.

Here's my first draft of Ari's reading list for next year.  Too long!

 

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

The Hobbit

Tuck Everlasting

The Wind in the Willows

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

My Side of the Mountain

Tales of Ancient Egypt

Sherlock Holmes?

The Incredible Journey

The Cat Who Went to Heaven

Homesick, Jean Fritz

A Wrinkle in Time

The Borrowers

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

Cheaper by the Dozen   

The Golden Goblet

Mara, Daughter of the Nile

Tales from Africa

Outcast (Sutcliffe)

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

The View from Saturday

Oscar Wilde stories (Happy Prince)

Tolstoy’s stories

Dr. Doolittle

Rip Van Winkle, et. Al Washington Irving

oh, and also The Bat Poet