In between all the snow-playing and Nook-reading and the having Dave at home-ing, we did a fairly regular week of school. Everything outside of the house was canceled, so that meant we could take it fairly easy every day but still wind up fitting in most everything. The run-down:
Ari: started working on Caesar's English Lesson 12, did a bunch of sentences in Practice Town, and finished lesson 9 in Paragraph Town. He did a few chapters in Life of Fred Pre-algebra, but with DH supervising, so I'm fuzzy on the details. He worked on Duke TIP's Growing Up Heroic. I fear it might be a little...touchy-feely for his tastes. One of his writing assignments this week was to write down one of our "family stories" and then think what makes it a good story and how it tells our family's story, etc. He wrote about getting Athena for Christmas, but insisted on writing it in verse. Umm. Yes, we'll see how it goes. He's still not quite finished with Lesson 1, so I think it also might take more time than I was hoping (there are 20 lessons total, and it's supposed to a be a semester-long course; I was hoping he could work on it for an hour and a half or two hours a week, but I don't think that's going to cut it if I want him to finish before the end of the year). He finished all his Spanish homework for the class that didn't happen, and worked a good bit on his Galore Park Spanish.
He finished reading The Giver, and we had a really good discussion about it. We talked about the anti-Giver arguments in Deconstructing Penguins and we read a positive review by Natalie Babbitt from the Washington Post. He had already brought up some of the suspension of disbelief issues that both reviews mention in different ways, so we talked about that. Babbitt compared the story to a beautiful soap bubble; if you poke and prod at it too much, it will break--but ultimately says it's a story that needs to be told and it's worth overlooking some gaps in the logic. I think Ari is conflicted. He doesn't like overlooking gaps in logic, but he really enjoyed the book.
Milo: more math! I broke up the Singapore with a couple of different games. I should probably keep doing that. This week's workbook stuff was pretty easy for him (it always is, as long as it's not adding or subtracting). He finished Matilda! And then read a book about Hercules (an Usborne early reader), so now he's going to finish Chamber of Secrets for school reading. At night he's reading The Penderwicks--at least until we get to the library to get the next Magic Tree House book (it's in our house somewhere, but we can't find it). He finished week 9 in WWE, did some ETC, and got 9 (out of 10) words right on his spelling test.
Gus: was sick for part of the week, so didn't do a whole lot. Today he did several pages of handwriting because I told him I'd get WWE 1 for him when he finishes it. He's been listening while I do it with Milo, and he likes to whisper the answers to the questions in my ear (so as not to interfere with Milo's answering).
History: the SOTW chapter this week was on the Greek Gods, so we skipped it since we're covering it in more detail with Jim Weiss CDs and the Du'laire's book. We did some reading, though.
Other stuff: Everyone worked on piano a good bit this week, since our piano teacher was home every day. Ari's working on a song from a book Dave used as a kid. We made more progress with Greek Code Cracker. We did the first lesson from PHP's new Bible curriculum, Telling God's Story and made some Roman coins for the activity. It's a 1st grade curriculum, so a bit simple for Ari, but I think it will work for now.
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