Weekly Wrap-up // Labor Day Week in Which All our Activities Started

A super full week as we added in the rest of our weekly activities that we are committing to for this fall!

On the scholastic front:

Math: Each girl got in three lessons this week. N1 is in the intro / review lessons for Saxon 3; N2 started learning how to tell time this week as well as new addition (+2) facts); B and I continued working with manipulatives and learning about patterns. Math went fairly well without too many wrinkles this week for which I was thankful. Part of me wants to skip ahead to some new material in N1’s math work because we are doing quite a bit of review, however, she has had some very successful timed tests this week which I think is making this slower progress more worthwhile. I’m seeing her confidence grow and that has been much needed in this area!

Language Arts:

N1: started Writing with Ease Level 3; completed lessons 78-79 in First Language Lessons; regular process in her Explode the Code and handwriting workbooks. She also finished Freddy the Detective and completed one of these book report sheets for me.

N2: finished Explode the Code 2 book and will be starting book 2 1/2 next week. Completed week 3 in Writing with Ease, lessons 7-8 in First Language Lessons (level 1), and her regular handwriting worksheets.

B: We have slowed waaaaaay down in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Waaaaaay down. She was getting so frustrated. We have backed off to a 1/2 lesson per day and will stay at that pace for a while I think. We are reading lots and lots of picture books together and talking about them. She is doing one handwriting worksheet a day and working on her fine motor skills. While we are backing off on her Lang Arts materials to move at her pace, I’ve been thankful to see her excited about doing math each day! She asks to do that first most days!

Social Studies/History: We listened to Story of the World, chapter 2, on the audio version and talked about the people that lived in/near the Fertile Crescent. This coincides nicely with our geography memory work for Classical Conversations this week – we learned where the Mediterranean Sea, Mesopotamia, the Euphrates and Tigris River, and Sumer were located.

Science: Our memory work for CC was the classification of living things which we have been learning about the last two weeks through lapbooking.

New activities:

Awana: Our Awana program started this week. N1 is in Trek (grades 3-6), N2 and B are in Sparks (K-2nd), and the boy began Puggles (ages 18mos – 3). As you can see, he was not at all excited about going. : )

We had our first day of Classical Conversations and I absolutely loved it. We have been practicing our memory work all week (I’m learning right along with the girls). This is from my class (faces hidden to protect the innocent) and B is helping a classmate hold her “all about me” poster for our first week’s presentation.

 

Right now we are doing a fine arts rotation for the next six weeks. We talked about the five basic shapes (dots, circles, lines, curves, and angles) that are found in most paintings and drawings and then used one of Ed Emberly’s fabulous drawing books to practice.

 

Bible: The girls and I are reading a chapter from Matthew most mornings. As of today, we started our CBS Bible study and will be working through 1 & 2 Kings and some of the minor prophets this year. The N’s (and myself) have lessons to prepare each week so I’m hoping to roll this in to part of our school day.

To sum up: our days are definitely full. I don’t think they are too full, but adding a third student this year + the busy boy has made our day longer. Right now we are starting each day around 9 a.m. (a few days this week it’s been between 9:30 – 10a.m. because of some phone calls and church work I needed to tackle) and we are wrapping up between 3 – 3:30 in the afternoons. In spite of the longer days, I’ve been pleased that the girls are hanging in there with me throughout the day to get their work done. I really think it helps that they rotate time with the boy and get small breaks in the morning. I’m not saying I don’t see room for improvement, of course, but for our official week three, I’ll take it.

Happy Friday! We have one girl’s first soccer game on Saturday and we’re hoping that it doesn’t get rained out; otherwise, we’ve got a weekend of tidying up the house and getting ready for next week in store. About like normal. : )

Linking up with Kris @ Weekly Unsocialized Homeschoolers.