Weekly Wrap-up ::: July 2–6 // The Week That Didn’t Go Like I Thought…

Our first week of our summer schooling is under our belt! We had a few good days and one pretty rough day – overall, not too bad a start at something that I’d never tried before, I suppose. : )

I posted our plans here for last week. In a nutshell, I wanted to help N1 wrap up a few things we didn’t finish last year and get a little more confident in doing math drills. I’m happy to report that we got three decent math lessons plus some drilling practice under our belt and I feel good about what she has remembered in our six week (or so) break. We also tackled a week in our Writing with Ease (completed) and three lessons in First Language Lessons. She and I are working on memorizing prepositions together so if you hear me walking around muttering, “aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, among”, etc. … now you know. : )

One of the highlights of our week was starting our body study. On Monday, we traced ourselves.



When I did this with N1 during her kindergarten year, I used presentation board (similar to this but I just bought mine at Walmart). I loved it because it was nice and stiff AND we could fold it up and put it away when we weren’t working on it. A huge plus when we lived in our old house and the school room doubled as the dining room. However, since we have a designated school room now, I decided to buy a roll of butcher paper which is going to come in handy for so many projects. A tip that a friend gave me – buy your roll at Sam’s in the restaurant supply aisle and not the teacher supply store. Much cheaper!

Now one of our school room walls looks like this:



(The wall is normally a giant distracting wall of mirrors so I’m almost enjoying it being covered up). : )

This week we read about the brain (what you see glued in the head area on each one above), the heart, the kidneys and the bladder.


N2 was thoroughly enjoying being a little teacher for B and helping her with her worksheet.




As far as some of the frustrating moments of this week … adding in two extra kids that aren’t really doing school with us has proved to be a bit more challenging that it looked on paper when I was planning it all out. (Insert a “duh” moment here). I’m not throwing in the towel just yet, but I’m doing some thinking and may try a few different things this next week. Another factor that totally slipped by me has to do with my kindergartener. B, who turned 5 in May, is such a young K student compared to when I started with the other girls. FYI, N1 turned six about two months after she started K, and N2 was 5y, 7mos. when she started. I now know need to go much slower than I was planning with her instead of diving into all her K stuff with a bang. For my child that is a firecracker most of the time, slow and gentle is how she needs to be approached about schooling. She never fails to surprise me, that one. : )

And this little dude. Let’s just say we are working on some creative containment ideas with him! His vocabulary is exploding now, but that needs to be a whole post on it’s own one of these days. It’s been a while since I’ve done a milestone-type post on him so maybe next week. He’s such a yummy distraction to our school days. : )



Linking up with Kris @ Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.