So far so good, but it is starting to get a little crazier. I feel like I'm constantly going with no time to stop. I'm falling behind on household duties, but homeschooling is going great! :-)
Here's what we've been up to this week -
Bible
Anna is continuing with the reading plans from YouVersion. She finished the Holy Week reading plan and started The Ten Commandments reading plan.
She added another two verses to her mastered list in ScriptureTyper this week so now has 12 verses mastered.
Art
Anna has been having fun with a site a found this week, my-how-to-draw.com . On the site they give you step by step instructions on how to draw all kinds of things. She followed the How to draw a Puppy, How to draw a Boxer, and How to draw kittens instructions to do the following sketches:
She started colouring that last one before I got a good picture of it.
We had a couple of people ask how to make the card Anna made last week so this week we decided to do an instructional video for it.
Language Arts (Grammar, Reading, Spelling, Writing)
Doing lessons 19-23 in First Language Lessons had us discussing contractions most of the week, with an introduction to adjectives at the end of the week.
We continued listening to Dr. Dolittle from BooksShouldBeFree.com and made it as far as chapter 16. However, we are both a little frustrated with the fact that there are different readers for the chapters and some of the readers are hard to understand and listen too. We are still narrating each chapter as we go along. Anna has started a new library book, Dog Magic by Holly Webb, and is working her way through that during silent reading time. I decided to test Anna's familiarity and recognition of the dolch words so I printed off the alphabetical list of the 220 dolch words and gave them to Anna to read. She did excellent. She skipped through the words quickly and only misread four of them. When I pointed those four out to her to look closer at she read them correctly without any help at all.
We finally got through word list 10 in Spelling Power and moved on to review test 2, but there were a couple of words that Anna really struggled with so we were stuck on that most of the week until she finally mastered them. Today we did the first delayed recall test and I wondered how she'd make out, but she got 100%!
The narration and dictation exercises this week in Writing With Ease were taken from two poems, Robert Lewis Stevenson's My Shadow and Edward Lear's The Owl And the Pussy Cat. The timing for the poem's was perfect because late last week a friend had made me aware of the Young Writers Poetry Contest and I decided to discuss it with Anna and do a little poetry study with her. We talked about different kinds of poems and had some fun reading different kinds of poems. She tried her hand at a free verse poem one day and another day we worked together on some poems inspired by Giggle Poetry's How to Write a "Mary Had a Little Something" poem page. We also started some prep work for NaNoWriMo. I printed off some pages from the NaNoWriMo workbook for us to work through and discuss. We discussed what a novel is and did some work on developing a possible main character for a story. Anna also continued work on her cursive writing completing the Kidzone cursive writing worksheets for h, k, b, and f, but she was a little frustrated with the f and decided she wants to take a break for a while from cursive so I'm going to allow that.
Math
Inspired by the Number Bonds Buildings and Walls Math Video from Education Unboxed, we had some fun reviewing addition facts by building number walls with cusinaire rods. The first day I asked Anna to build a number wall for each number but she found that a little frustrating and overwhelming. The next day I suggested she build walls for numbers 1-5 while I built walls for numbers 6-10. Both days I got her to dictate the equations in each wall while I wrote them out.
The next day I got her to do number walls for the odd numbers while I made number walls for the even numbers, and we switched it up the next day with her doing the even numbers and me doing the odd numbers. We also did the dictation of the equations both days.
Besides doing the number walls we also played other games each day - Guess the addends, Race to Ten, and I love to do addition. One day we did some free play with the rods after our lessons and games.
Music
Anna decided she wanted to learn In Christ Alone this week. Everyday she listened to this YouTube version of the song and today I taped her singing it while she listened to it in her earphones, because she didn't feel confident enough in the tune to sing it without listening to it. All week she pretend to play along with it on an invisible piano as she sang. I was surprised she didn't do more of that today. She struggled a little with it because it was a hard key for her to sing but she refused to try any other one.
Thursday Anna had her first ever piano lesson, and we finally got our piano tuned (after probably 30 years) so this will be an added dimension to her music program.
Phys. Ed.
We went swimming three times this week. We've worked out a routine where we do a couple of laps across the pool and a lap up and down the pool and then Anna can have some free play time before we repeat the routine. We manage to get about three routines in each session. We are both really enjoying it and she is getting much more comfortable and confident in the water. It's hard to believe that less than a year ago she wouldn't even put her face in the water.
Science
In our lessons in Exploring Creation With Zoology 1 we discussed lift and drag, air pressure, air foil and aerodynamic shapes. We had great fun doing an experiment that demonstrated the affects of air pressure.
Social Studies
I had completely forgotten about the test book that I had for the Story of the World Volume 2: The Middle Ages so we hadn't done any of the end of chapter tests so far. We finished chapter four Monday so I decided to take the rest of the week do the chapter tests. Each day we reviewed a different chapter and did the test together. I decided to do the tests together rather than have her do them on her own as a way of easing her into test taking skills. She ended up doing most of the work with little help from me and we had a great time doing the tests and reviewing the material.
And that's our weekly wrap-up. How was your week?
Weekly Wrap-up Posts inspired by Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers Weekly Wrap-up Meme. Check out her wrap-up for this week and scroll down to see the links to check out weekly wrap-ups from others.
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