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| Everyone getting to work Monday morning at their new desks |
Tornado Boy
Math: So last week we finished 2A. This week, I pulled out the shapes chapter of 2B, my son looked at it and said "Shapes?" Yes, he knew the shapes. He didn't need to work on it. We did a page on area (counting the squares, as multiplication hasn't been introduced yet), and he figured out that multiplying would get him the area, and thus he multiplied all the rest. :P So then I started looking ahead at what all is in 2B. We needed to hit fractions, as some of that was newish. The 3-digit addition/subtraction really didn't need to be done, as he's shown mastery of that in his IP books already. Teaching him 2-digit just carried over to 3-digit quite easily. The other chapter in 2B is an introduction to the concept of multiplication, which he didn't need (he understands the concept - just hasn't worked on it enough to learn all his facts yet). Then I looked at 3A and decided to do the fractions in 2B, then skip ahead to the multiplication chapter (2) in 3A. We'll do chapters 2 and 3, then come back to chapter 1 (addition/subtraction review) as review, then continue on in 3A and 3B. Tornado Boy loved doing fractions this week, and he also loved starting multiplication this week. And to my surprise, he has several of his multiplication facts memorized after just doing a few sections of that chapter.
We also continued some more in Primary Challenge Math. He loves this book so much. We've been going straight through. I think we're in the money chapter now. We've done all levels, including Einstein level. I usually have to help him with that level, of course, but I have him lead us through how to solve the problem. I ask him what to do first, what operation we should use, etc. If it involves long division, I do that and show him what I'm doing. He's learning a lot this way.
Reading: Um... I think we may have forgotten to do "reading". Oops. Though he was "reading" all week long. He's several chapters ahead of where we are officially in SOTW, for example. He has a book with him much of the day. So we're still in Boxcar Children #3, and he may have only read one or two chapters this week, but that's ok.
Grammar: Ok, time to flip-flop again. I feel like a politician. :P We've been going through FLL2, and I got to thinking about R&S English again, looked through the 2nd grade book I still have on my shelf, and decided that it isn't so bad in the later chapters (and looking at samples online of later grades - they don't look so bad either). What got me thinking about this was the fact that I would like him to be doing more writing during his grammar lessons - not composition, but just writing down the usage of a particular grammar topic being learned. Afterall, he has excellent grammar when speaking already. He really doesn't need to work on it orally. He needs to work on writing it. So I had him do a couple lessons in R&S 2 (I just picked random lessons that backed up things we've done in FLL2 recently), and he did very well copying the sentences, filling in the words, etc. I think it was good for him - both to improve his writing stamina, but also to get him using that grammar. He seemed to like it a little better than FLL. I would like to do the last couple units of R&S 2, and I'm planning to order R&S English 3 for next year... or this summer. I don't know yet. I'll probably finish FLL2, maybe going at a quicker pace (because we can), and then hop into R&S 3 and see what happens. He's ready for the grade 3 grammar work. I do want the foundation of the parts of speech definitions that FLL gives though. That has been very beneficial.
Also, thinking ahead to when I have The Brute and Mischief schooling, R&S would probably be easier to use. I can go over the lesson, then have them do their written work. That was actually pretty nice the two days we tried it this week. I didn't have him do all the exercises, but I had him do every other one if it was an exercise where you write a whole sentence, and I had him do all of the ones where it was just write one or two words from the sentence. He could NOT have done this in January when we started homeschooling. It would have been too much writing. I'm so happy that we've gotten to this point where writing isn't so bad. :) I even had him do an exercise where he was to come up with a sentence about himself (actually it was 3 sentences, but I said to just do one). He wrote "I am writing". :)
Some grammar done this week:
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| The Year poem copywork from FLL2 |
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| Two days of R&S |
Writing: This week's passages came from Hillyer's A Child's Geography of the World. I can tell you right now that I will never use that book. I had a hard time reading it. How convoluted can you make the atmosphere? I think telling kids the scientific terms would be more understandable. :P
Handwriting: We did not do any official handwriting this week, however... We were going to visit Mr. Joe, who just had hip replacement surgery. I decided to have the two older boys draw pictures for him and had Tornado Boy write a letter. I cannot believe the nice, neat handwriting my son did! I was also pleased that he used his AAS knowledge to spell the words (I did tell him that "better" had two 't's before he started writing it, as we haven't gotten to that yet - but he remembered "feel" and "soon" on his own - yay!). Here is the letter:
Spelling: We did spelling 2 days this week, I think? I know we did one step each day. They were fairly simple, so they didn't take very long. We'll get more done next week.
Read-Aloud: We finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh! I really, really enjoyed that book... except the end. :P I like a little more closure. Yes, I'm sure we can guess who the two rats are that died, but Mrs. Frisby is left to guess too. I don't know. I just hated the ending.
Bible: We continued to learn about Jeroboam and Rehoboam, and the fact that they both had sons named Abijah. One died as a child, and the other became a king. I had to look back and see who we had talked about previously when it started talking about Abijah the king. :)
History: We finished last week's chapter, talking about the Olympics. We did the first section this week, but didn't get to the second section yet. It's ok, we'll catch up! Tornado Boy has been reading ahead, so he's well into the Romans, while I'm still hanging out with the Greeks.
Science: We discussed the sun in Apologia Astronomy. Then Friday (since we were slackers and skipped science Thursday), we did the first lesson in BJU Science 3. It is an intro lesson, so not much to it. Next week we'll do two actual lessons where you learn stuff. :)
Art: We did art! We drew geese. I didn't take pictures yet. Doh!
The Brute
Math: We did several pages of our math book this week. He was really into math! He colored a certain number of blocks, made graphs of various objects, etc. He also started writing numbers 1-5.
I got a new toy this week, the ProClick binding machine. Here is The Brute's new math book:
Reading: We didn't do any reading this week.
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