Ari: Ari's working on the first review section in Singapore 5A, after a week full of complaining about long division and multiplication by 2 digit numbers. It also took him forever most days to do a full exercise, which wreaked havoc on nicely typed out schedule. In other math news, DH's Math Olympiad team had its first meeting this week. I was in the other room, talking to moms and stuff, so I don't know so many details, but it seems that it went well.
We finished the second lesson in Caesar's English, and he got everything right on the quiz. He slyly confessed at one point during the week that maybe he sort of kind of actually likes the MCT stuff. I continue to be very impressed with the progress I can see in his understanding of all the concepts. Until recently, his first inclination with the Practice Island sentences was to blurt out guess after guess when he got to a word and couldn't immediately identify the part of speech. I hate to bash on First Language Lessons, and I'm sure it's great for a lot of kids, but I think it really trained him to do that, because he COULD guess and be right in that book. Doesn't work in Practice Island, and he's finally stopping and thinking about what the word's doing in the sentence before he writes anything down now. Overheard: "...wait, this can't be a direct object, because it's in a prepositional phrase. Oh!" Worth noting that Ari has already had a more thorough education in grammar than I ever had, despite my 7 years of higher education in English.
I'm having him do dictation from the books he's reading instead of WWE now. I think. That's what we did this week anyway; he did two sentences from Tuck Everlasting, and I was pleased with this because 1. have I mentioned that the writing in Tuck Everlasting is gorgeous? and 2. it was a sneaky way for me to get in more lit. discussion, since I kind of feel like I didn't do it right last week. Or at least not thoroughly enough. So I am tentatively liking the idea of tying the dictation in to the reading both because it's more relevant and because it's a way to do some good close reading with him.
Neither of us is thrilled with Spanish for Children. I actually bought it over a year ago and wasn't thrilled with it then, which is why I haven't used it before now. He watched a couple of episodes of the 5th/6th grade Elementary Spanish on Discovery Education this week instead. I don't know. I guess I need to wait and see what the Spanish class he's taking at LEO is like and then reevaluate what kind of program would be the best supplement to that. I can't believe no one's come up with a really great homeschool Spanish program...one of those things everyone who uses raves about.
He's still reading The Boy of the Painted Cave. Reading time was cut short a couple of times this week for one reason or another...he's almost finished with it. He doesn't dislike it as much now as he did at first, either.
Milo: He continued to do 2 exercises a day in Singapore, and that went just fine. It was all adding and subtracting and working with the number line this week.
I just this second realized that we forgot to do his spelling test on Friday. oops. I'll do that Monday.
He's still tearing through books. This week he read My Father's Dragon, Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, and started on The Boxcar Children (on top of his relentless Geronimo Stilton reading at bedtime). He's got one more lesson in ETC 4, and then he'll start 5. I've already bought 5, so we'll go ahead and do that, but I think we might call the formal phonics finished after that and, Master Reader (which he'll finish in the next maybe 4-5 weeks, I would guess).
Gus: Gus can write all the numbers through 5 now, and almost never gets them backwards! I'm glad to be on a break from number writing in Earlybird right now (I haven't looked ahead to see how long it lasts). I mean, he's still writing numbers, but only when the number is the answer to a question.
He finished lesson 65 in McRuffy phonics. I am tempted to switch him over to ETC, as I don't think he really needs a particularly intense phonics program. He's reading stuff like "Did Dad dig a pit?" in McRuffy and then, at the same time, reading a level 2 "I Can Read" Arthur book with, "It was a rainy afternoon. Violet was looking at picture books. Arthur was reading comics." But he also sometimes stumbles over words like "did" and "pit" (mostly by putting the wrong vowel in), so I know that a lot of his more advanced reading is sight reading, and he definitely needs the phonics. I want to be careful not to give in to the temptation to drop formal phonics too early with him...but I also think ETC along with lots of readers would suffice. Eh, I don't know.
History: We did chapter 3 in SOTW, "The First Writing." We read a couple more myths from Egyptian Myths and read "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Sumerian Slave." Ari read the third chapter in The Story of Science (and outlined some of it during his language arts time). We did the mapwork, and Milo and Gus did narrations. We looked at the relevant sections in Take Me Back and the Usborne encyclopedia. The kids spent a long time sending messages to each other and writing their names in hieroglyphs, and we played around with cuneiform in play-doh (I thought we had actual clay, but it turns out we don't).
And our Nile is growing beautifully! Why is it so much easier to grow grass in a baking tin in my schoolroom than in my yard? I think we need to feed the Nile to the chickens pretty soon.
Science: umm, might need tweaking again. Ari is bored with it and says he knows it all already. Which is true of the stuff we've been doing so far (properties of matter, phases of matter, etc.), but I don't know that it will continue to be true for long. I let him try the middle school level instead last week, which he still wasn't wild about but did, I think, like somewhat better. The problem is we really need another computer if he's going to do that. We have another computer when Dave's home, so I guess he could do science in the evenings. We can probably get another computer for Xmas, but not before then. I'm also not sure how much longer our main computer is going to last. We're still trying to decide if we can afford the biology class at LEO. If he's taking a year long biology class I may just do science for the younger kids at home and not worry about Ari. That sounds kind of heavenly, actually.
All in all, a pretty good week. I'm enjoying this all to brief period when we can stay home all day most days, before all the outside activities start up and things get crazy. Looks like starting in a few weeks our schedule will be:
Mondays: home?
Tuesdays: home?
Wednesdays: out of the house from 10:30-mid afternoon for classes at LEO
Thursdays: soccer from 1-3, then math olympiad from 6:30-7:30
Fridays: park day in the afternoon
Somewhere in there I'll need to fit in lunch with my grandmother and getting together every other week with my stepmother and little brother/sister. All of this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need an alarm clock. This rolling out of bed whenever and starting school anytime between 8:30 and 9:30 thing isn't going to work anymore pretty soon. Sigh. I love sleep.
2 comments:
Sounds like a great week. I love the Nile.
wow. That sounds very productive!
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