November 1-5, 2010: Week 14

I have big plans to someday post some pictures here again. But first I need my refurbished computer to have a working card reader. Or I suppose I could see if I can figure out how to connect the camera to the computer, but I haven't done that in forever, and I have no idea if we even have the right cable and whatnot to do it anymore. So you'll have to make up your own pictures in your head again this week. I could have taken pictures with my iphone, I guess. Hmm. Oh well.

So what did we do this week? Aw, hell, I can't remember. It's been a long week. Thursday night DH and I went to see Mike Birbiglia while my brother played Wii with our kids and put them to bed for us, so that was fun. Oh, but the homeschooling....right. Let me think.

Ari returned to Singapore, the happy math that doesn't make anyone cry (in this house, anyway), and that was awesome. He's doing the final review in 5A now and just has a page or two left. He did cry about having to give titles to the three paragraphs in The Gettysburg Address for Paragraph Town, though. Well, maybe he didn't actually cry, but he didn't like it. He finished lesson 9 in Caesar's English and lesson 13 in Spelling Workout, but we didn't get the tests done today; we'll do them Monday most likely. He's still reading The Golden Goblet. He was reading a bunch of Lemony Snicket at bedtime, but I believe he's now re-reading the last Harry Potter in preparation for the movie. Perhaps I should do that, too.

He finished his first session of Biology and Spanish at LEO. They had a test in Spanish, and he got a 91; he had a bit of trouble with articles, I guess. He and DH spent hours and hours making a lovely poster about the differences and similarities in plant and animal cells for his final project in biology. That would have been a nice thing to put a picture of right here.

Milo also did Singapore, but it did not go quite as swimmingly with him. He's working on mentally adding numbers within 100, like 45 + 27 and such. As usual, he can do it, but it's agonizingly slow and he gets distracted very, very easily.

He's reading Roald Dahl's Matilda, having finished Socks early in the week. It's possible I've abandoned the idea of having him read the books used in WWE. I tried to get him to read Ginger Pye, and he hated it. "I hated that book, too," Ari told him. So maybe he can just read awesome books this year and that will be good enough. He's on a big Roald Dahl kick with bedtime reading, too. He read Esio Trot, The Magic Finger, and The Enormous Crocodile this week. We finally finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at bedtime, so I think his plan is to start reading Sorcerer's Stone to himself after we watch the movie (tomorrow, if netflix comes through for us). Tonight I started Lord of the Rings at bedtime (just for the older two), but I'm not sure if it's going to work or not. Ari wanted me to read The Hobbit again first, but I just it to them last year and don't want to again right now. I suggested he read it to himself, but he didn't think much of that idea.

Gus finally did some more math; it was measurement, which he thinks is really cool. He finished reading his Bones book and picked up where he left off months ago in Dav Pilkey's "Dragon Tales." He also says he's reading Ribsy to himself. I'm not really sure what's going on there.

I finally got around to more science with Gus and Milo. We started the unit on energy at Discovery Education. Then someone on the WTM boards posted about how the new level of Nebel's Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding is out, and the download is only $5. This, in turn, made me feel sad about how we abandoned BFSU after 8 lessons a couple of years ago, so I pulled it out and did the first lesson on energy (and bought the download. Because it's only $5!). It was, of course, terribly successful, and the kids were all into it, and, you know, maybe I should try to do it every week. Sigh. I'm very glad I got the Discovery Education Science, because it's working as intended--an easy way to at least get some science done every week (unless my computer's broken). Now I only have to feel guilty about not adding supplemental stuff in. And next week Ari gets to start cutting up cow eyeballs and stuff in his biology class, so no guilt there!

I signed both Milo and Gus up for a beginning Spanish class at LEO starting next week. I think last week I mentioned the preschool sewing class Gus wanted to take...not enough kids signed up for it, so it's not happening. But I managed to talk him into Spanish. I hope it goes well. Milo took Spanish with Ari (with a different teacher) last year; he was the youngest in the class by far, and there was a lot of writing, and it was kind of a hot mess.

History! Another two chapter week; we did chapters 16 and 17 in SOTW, and learned about Assyria and Babylon. We looked at the Usborne quicklinks and found a choose your own adventure type story about trade in Babylon. We built a siege tower out of legos. We also went ahead and started listening to our Jim Weiss Greek Mythology CD, because we just couldn't wait any longer. Well, something like that. Oh, also. We do a poem of the day most mornings, and for the past few weeks they've been from a book called Voices of Ancient Egypt that we found at the library. Each page has a poem told from the perspective of a different worker--dancer, stone cutter, scribe, et. al. It's really nicely done--lovely illustrations and text.

Oh, last thing: kids are all doing Nanowrimo this month. I think they set their word count goals too low; Ari said 800, but he's already over halfway done with that. Milo and Gus are both dictating to me, so it's kind of slow going. But they're excited, so that's lovely to see.