Weekly Update

This update will be for the last 2 weeks since I didn't write one last week (mainly because I worked last weekend). Last Thursday we took the day off from school and read the book House of Love, a Lamplighter publication. It was a great book and the kids didn't even want me to eat lunch so I could continue reading. It is a fairly lengthy book so we finished it on Monday.

Math: Ellie did several lessons and took a test. She only missed 1 on the test pertaining to milliliters/liters. She has a hard time remembering how many milliliters are in a liter and other metric conversions so we really need to work on those. Thursday she had a really bad attitude about math. After 45 minutes or so of "working" on her math, she came out for a snack and I assumed she was done. When I asked her about it, she said she was on problem number 4!!!!!! So I asked her what she was doing the whole time. After much prodding and pulling of teeth, she admitted that she was just sitting there thinking about how much she didn't want to do her math! So as a consequence she folded 3 large baskets of laundry (her bad attitude continued, hence the total of 3 baskets). The other days she didn't have a bad attitude about her math.
Kara reviewed her math facts again last week and this week we started Saxon Math 2. It is pretty much review right now so we are still averaging 2 lessons per day. I was explaining to her what an AB pattern was and she just looked at me and said, "Mom, I learned that already in Kindergarten!!!" That was the end of that math lesson. :-)

English: Ellie did several lessons. We usually do a few lessons in one sitting since we don't get to it every day. We are currently learning about adjectives. Kara did a few lessons in FLL.

Handwriting: Kara did a couple of the copywork selections from FLL and several of her pages from Daily Handwriting. Her handwriting was getting sloppy again so I am watching this a bit more closely and when she actually tries, she has great handwriting. As someone posted somewhere once--you get what you inspect not what you expect. So true.

Latin: Ellie finished lesson 17. We hadn't been very good about saying her recitations every day, but we've picked that up. She knows them pretty well thankfully.

History: We read chapters 23 and 24 from SOTW about the Greek gods (a review for us) and about the war between the Greeks and the Persians. We also are reading a library book about the building of the Parthenon and the Athenians contribution of architecture. It is quite a fascinating study. The Parthenon is held together by gravity--no mortar, nails, etc.

Spelling: Kara continues in SWO B. Ellie didn't do any spelling. She is such a natural speller that mostly we just correct any misspellings in her writing.

Reading: Kara is reading like crazy. She read 2 books from the library that I picked out and she has read several others. She is trying to fill out several McDonald's redemption certificates since she likes the current Happy Meal toys. Another week or 2 an she'll be done with OPGTR. Ellie finished Pinocchio and is currently reading Around the World in 80 Days.

Science: We continued our chapter on space rocks. They learned the difference between asteroids, meteoroids, meteorites and comets.

Art/Music: We listened to several selections from Mozart. The girls also colored their own Van Gogh painting. This was our last week on Mozart and Van Gogh so we'll move on to new artists next week. We also really need to get back into doing the How Great Thou Art lessons.