February 7-11, 2011: Week 24

The problem with waiting until Sunday to write the weekly report is that I no longer have any memory of what we did all week. Especially when the weekend has involved a head cold (for me, Dave, Ari, and Gus), a basketball tournament, (for Ari) and a math tournament (for Dave). But I have some pictures, so I will do my best to reconstruct. Looking through the pictures, it appears that mostly we played with the kitten all week:

But there must have been more. Let me think.

Ari: started reading The Hobbit and did a few dictation sentences from it. We're reading Fellowship of the Ring as a read aloud at bedtime, so I hope it is not too confusing. He seems to be handling it okay. He is annoyed with J.K. Rowling right now and how much she borrowed from LOTR. It is a little startling, I have to say. We're reading the endless Council of Elrond chapter right now in FOTR, and I'm finding it so tedious (one of Ari's Caesar's English words!) myself that I can't believe Ari and Milo aren't complaining about it. They are generally very quick to complain when they're not into a book, though (especially Ari), so I can only assume they're actually enjoying it.

Ari hasn't gotten around to Life of Fred for a couple of weeks now; it's all Singapore all the time. He's working on percents right now. He had another competition for Math Olympiad this week; word is the test are getting a bit tougher as the year goes on. There's one more in March, and then he's finished with that for the year.

He did two writing assignments: a summary about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome, and a paragraph comparing and contrasting dwarves and hobbits. Oh, he also did a journal entry for Growing Up Heroic--he wrote a diary entry from the perspective of a kid in Ancient Greece.

I went ahead and ordered Killgallon's Sentence Composing for Elementary School, and he did the first two assignments from it. More on that after I've had a chance to see it action for awhile.

Wednesday was his last biology dissection class at LEO; he dissected a sheep's brain. I let him decide whether he wanted me to sign him up for the next session (on the human body) or not, thinking he definitely wouldn't want to do it, but he surprised me and said he did. I'm making him sign a paper saying it was his choice to take it, so I can pull it out and show him when he starts complaining about the homework.

Milo: did surprisingly well starting addition with renaming in Singapore. It takes him awhile, but he's not getting frustrated or complaining too much. I think at this rate he's going to finish up Singapore 2A when he's in 8th grade or so, but slow and steady wins the race, right? Really, I'm hoping to do math over the summer and get through at least some of 2B before the fall.

Still reading Chamber of Secrets for school. For free reading, he's still tearing through Magic Tree House, and he also read the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book.

He did another week in WWE2; this week's book was The Borrowers.

Gus: did some more Singapore 1a, and also, on his own time, for fun, made a sheet with different ways to make 10. He wrote down all the pairs of numbers, plus a couple ways to add 3 numbers together to get 10, but got stuck when he got to -1. I drew a number line to help him out, and then he added -1+11 and -2+12.

He finished reading both "Frog and Toad are Friends" (to me) and "Frog and Toad All Year" (to Dave). He's starting on Little Bear now at bedtime, and I need to think about what he should read to me for school. He's at the point where he's reading Frog and Toad, et. al. fluently with no help, so I'd like to save those for independent bedtime reading and have him read something a little more challenging for school.

History: we read the chapter on the beginning of Rome in SOTW, which means we really need to wrap up that Alexander the Greek book. But it will probably be another week or two.

Science! Our kits came on Monday, so we did two activities on Tuesday, one from each kit. The first one was pretty simple--mostly just feeling our chests and throats to check out the respiratory system. The second one was really cool, though--we made little poking/measuring devices out of (included!) hair pins, making one with the tips .5 cm apart, then all the way up to 3 cm at half cm intervals. Then we blindfolded someone and touched various body parts (back of hand, palm, finger, back of neck, arm, leg) with the different hairpins to see which body parts have the most nerve receptors (for the less sensitive body parts, you can only feel one of the hairpin points when they're close together).

Incidentally, the blindfold is one we already had. The nutshell kit did come with one, but it was made of plastic and tore as soon as we put it on, and wasn't comfortable. Disappointment! Other than that, though, I'm very pleased so far.

On Thursday, we did the section on the digestive system from Discovery Education Science (I did the elementary one with Milo and Gus; Ari worked on the middle school one on his own). Then we read from Open Me Up, again about the digestive system.