Friday, September 20, 2013

Weekly wrap-up - new grand baby added some craziness

In the wee hours of Sunday morning my second grandchild was born.

I'll tell you more about that in another post. His birth added a little craziness into our week but we wouldn't trade it for anything.

The fact that he was born in the wee hours of the morning meant that our sleep was completely disturbed that night and we've been struggling to get back on track all week. That has affected our starting times each day but we haven't done too bad.

We've also been anxious to see him as much as possible so we've been trying to get our work done as fast as possible so we would be free to go see him. This has been a great motivator for actually getting our work done, so that's a bonus.

There was just one day this week that we ended up shortening our official learning time. That was the day our little Isaac went home from the hospital. We helped get them settled in at home. I recorded that day as a half day of school in the Homeschool Helper but I was still pleased with the amount of work we did manage to do that day.

Here's a summary of what we did this week in each subject area:

Bible

Anna is still enjoying doing the Walk With Jesus: 21 Days Through Matthew reading plan in the YouVersion App and reviewing her Bible verses with the Scripture Typer App. She's made it to day thirteen of the reading plan and has mastered seven verses.

Art

Art was a mod podge of things this week. Anna decided to draw on some balloons. She drew a dog face on one balloon and a cat face on another.

She also did a few sketches this week. She sat outside and looked for thing to draw. One day she did two sketches - one of a tree and the other of Buddy, our neighbour's dog. Another day she sketched Brody, the little guy that lives next door.

I did just one quick sketch one day this week of a picture I took of my new grandson sucking on his daddy's finger.

 

Grammar

Continuing on with our lessons in First Language Lessons, we learned about linking verbs this week. One activity involved writing nouns on some cards, linking verbs on others, and adjectives on others and then selecting a card from each group to put together to make sentences. Anna really enjoyed that.

 

Math

I am thrilled with the change in Anna's attitude toward math. She's really loving math time right now, and she is really learning. We are continuing playing games to review math facts. Anna wanted to make up her own game one day this week and we've been playing it every day since. You can read about it in a post with the title she game the game - I Love to Do Addition Game. Friday we spent some time playing with pattern blocks, learning the names of the shapes and problem solving as we made pictures with them.

Music

This week we worked on learning O Canada. Anna didn't quite have the tune down by taping time. She was still struggling to stay in tune in a couple of sections so I suggested that she use her ear phones to listen to the YouTube Video of O Canada that we'd been listening to all week while I taped her singing it. If you listen closely you can hear where she starts to stray from the tune but she did a pretty good job.

 

Reading

We are continuing to listen to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. We've made it up to chapter 18. We've had some great discussion inspired by the book so far. Anna finished the Magic kitten book she was reading during silent reading so we went to the library to get a new one for her to start next week.

Social Studies

We managed to do two sections in Story of the World: Middles Ages this week. We really enjoyed reading the version of the story of Beowulf in the book. The lyrical way it was written made it fun to listen to.

This coming Tuesday is municipal election time in our province. We spent some time this week discussing the elections and the three tier government system of Canada. Anna read the candidate flyers that came to our house and we checked out the information sheet about polling booths to see where we needed to go to vote. Anna was quite upset to learn that she can't vote yet. I'm hoping she still wants to vote when she's old enough to.

Spelling

Anna is still loving spelling. She did her first review test this week in Spelling Power and got 100%! We made it almost all the way through list seven this week. Anna is really starting to pay attention to spelling and I love watching her stop to see if a word looks right the way she's written it before asking for it to be checked. She is doing great!

Writing

Did the week two lessons in Writing With Ease. We really enjoyed the passages that we had to narrate from Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Anna is doing great with her dictation exercises and copy work.

This week we started introducing cursive writing. We are working our way through the Cursive Writing Worksheets at Kidzone. She's mastered a, d, and g so far.

And that's our Weekly Wrap, inspired by the Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap-up. Why not fun in the fun and tell us about your week?