Weekly Recap 9/27-10/1/10

This week was, literally, all over the place. We began in West Virginia looking for farms and ended at home enjoying a play and time with friends. We are struggling to stay up with our school work but we spent lots of time together, swam, ate and laughed a lot.

Here are some of the highlights of the properties we looked at on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Eight more places, no winners yet.

Winner of the best pond award.

My favorite master bedroom.

The most excellent hay loft.

The prettiest barn.

The best fencing.

The favorite house as chosen by the children.

The prettiest piece of property.

Hay like this just begs to be climbed.

As for school stuff, M6 is continuing to enjoy Song School Latin.  We've added mother, father, sister and brother to our "How are you? (Quid Agis?)" game.  She's also subtracting with ease and zipping right through identifying numbers 1-30.  In reading, she's starting blended sounds.  Friday we tackled -ck with no problem.

S8 is moving quickly through his grammar and Latin.  Latina Christiana is a much better fit for him and he seems to enjoy it.  Rather than making him do separate writing, he is completing all of his Latin exercises in cursive.  It's fine for copy work and is keeping his assignments neat.  He's still reviewing his multiplication tables 0-12.  I think we'll move away from that in the next week or so.  We are reading Arabian Knights aloud.

H11 is finishing up the Writing with Skill pilot lessons.  She's enjoyed it but is anxious to return to something more creative.  She's also enjoying Analytical Grammar so much more than the Rod & Staff we used last year.  We finished reading Beowulf together but have yet to begin Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Broadview Literary Texts) .  I plan to start that this coming week.

In history, we learned more about China, Japan and Korea.  We are listening to Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

K14 continues to pose the biggest challenge.  Having her go to the high school for three classes is great.  She enjoys the social time and it gives me a break every other day.  Teaching three children is much easier than teaching four!  However, on the days that she is at home, she's a master procrastinator.  Keeping her on task and making sure she completes a reasonable amount of work each day is a real challenge.  She enjoys working with me but uses my other obligations as a reason that she is unable to put in the learning time I expect.  I'm going to have to figure out a resolution to this before she falls even farther behind.

The final highlight of our week was seeing a production of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  While the recommended age range was pre-kindergarten through third grade we all found it to be entertaining.  This is part of the Chase series offered by our local university and is a free program.  We are blessed to be able to enjoy such quality performances at no cost.