January 31-February 4, 2011: Week 23

This week was a sharp contrast to last week, in that we had very few outside the house plans, so we were able to stay home most of the time and be alternately very productive and very lazy. The weather was awful for most of the week, so we also spent a lot of time inside and watched terrible things on the TV, like Home Alone 3. Well, I didn't watch Home Alone 3, but the kids did. Sometimes, when it's 38 and raining, you just have to let your kids eat popcorn and watch Home Alone 3. Also, you have to make a skillet cookie, so we did that after Home Alone 3 was over:

Ari is unwrapping butter while Gus makes a funny face. And the finished product:

This was all on Friday. We usually finish up school early on Friday and then go to park day with some friends. But said friends (two different families) were ALL going out of town to warm places, so no park day. We thought about going somewhere ourselves, but it seemed much cozier to stay home with Skillet Cookie (Skillet Cookie is like a friend at this point, so it's a proper noun). And THEN, Friday night,  my mom watched the kids while Dave and I went to the Waffle House and to see The King's Speech, so it was pretty much, like, the best Friday EVER.

So that's how the week ended. Now to back up.

We did a lot of history this week, but very little science, because we're waiting on a package from Delta Education--a couple of human body Science in a Nutshell kits. We did start reading from David Macaulay's The Way We Work, though, on Friday, in between bites of Skillet Cookie:

We read about cells and atoms (I'm not sure if you knew this, but people are MADE out of cells, which, in turn, are made out of atoms). Atoms, in case you've not heard, are very, very small. Macaulay includes a hard to follow if you are Gus analogy involving a tennis ball, a terrier, and Manhattan.

For history, we read the chapter (26, I think) on the ancient Americas in SOTW, but kept reading about Greece otherwise. It's all the same books as last week, so I'll post a picture of them instead of saying what they are again:

(and this is where the pictures dry up. But next week there will be science and, therefore, pictures!) Ari kept working on "Growing Up Heroic" which suggests he watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding and compare a modern Greek American family with ancient Greek families. It's been a long time since I watched MBFGW, and I'm trying to remember if it's something the kids would actually sit through or not.

Ari did two writing assignments again this week--a summary about the Nazca people from SOTW and a compare/contrast paragraph about Sparta and Athens for Paragraph Town. Next week he's going to do the same assignment again, but this time comparing and contrasting two characters from A Wrinkle in Time.  Speaking of which, he finished A Wrinkle in Time this week. He did several sentences from Practice Town, read some stuff about meter in his poetry book (I'm not having him do any of the poetry writing assignments unless he wants to, so much trauma did it cause last year. I had a sneaking suspicion that he secretly likes writing poetry, though, and this was confirmed by my discovery of a notebook in his room, entitled, "Poetry Inspired by Literature" with a series of poems based on A Series of Unfortunate Events), and did two dictation sentences from A Wrinkle in Time, which I used as a springboard for some brief discussion about setting and character.

Milo had a good week in math! He's doing 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction without renaming, and he likes it So.Much.Better than the mental addition and subtraction he was doing before. I think with his focus issues, he just has a very hard time holding everything in his head long enough to do something like 24 + 33 mentally. But he's finally quick enough with his facts up to 10 that doing it in columns is no problem. So it was nice to a have a week without despair in math. He's still reading Chamber of Secrets, and I'm not sure he'll ever finish. In other reading, he finished up the first Lemony Snicket book, read a few more Magic Treehouses, and read some of the Ask Me Anything book he got for Christmas. He did narration and dictation from Pilgrim's Progress in WWE this week; that John Bunyon isn't very subtle with the whole allegory thing, is he?

Gus loves his RFWP Aesop books. He also loves math, and tells me so whenever Milo says that he hates math. He's still working on 1A; I pretty much just turn him loose on it while Milo's doing math, and let him do as much or as little as  he wants. He took a break from Frog and Toad this week to read to me from his animal encylopedia:

 We learned that there's a fish that can swim faster than a cheetah can run, and that the octopus has a really big brain.