Weekly Report - Year 3 Week 17

And the holiday season begins! We took 2 weeks off for Thanksgiving, when I had intended to only take off that actual week. Oh well. We had to put our dog Kira to sleep the week before Thanksgiving. She was old and had had neurological problems for the last 3 years, so it was expected. She was a sweet girl.

Kira

So that derailed our school plans, and frankly, I just wasn't in the mood to teach the rest of the week. I declared it a week off. We then prepared for a new adoption... We got Keiko that Saturday. Her name in rescue was actually Kira, so of course we changed it. Keiko was dropped off at a shelter with 2 1-week old pups back in September. The pups are weaned now, and one has been adopted (yay!). The other is still waiting. Keiko has the BEST temperament! She's a really great dog. She is a dark sable German Shepherd.

Stalking Aerial, the cat

Ok, so after Thanksgiving, we got back to school work. We had a good week, and our main interruption was getting a piano - finally! We had been planning to get one last April, but then the garage fire happened literally within 2 weeks of our planned piano purchase date. DH had to set up his "office" in the space that the piano was going, so the piano had to wait until the garage office was fixed up again. The day before Thanksgiving, we stopped by a piano store and purchased a digital piano. It was delivered Monday. In the piano store, I taught Mischief where middle C is. He still remembered it on Monday! He proudly tells everyone where it is. :)

Mischief playing piano

Tornado Boy

Math: We covered multiplication and division of decimals by whole numbers and multiplication and division of decimals by 10, 100, and 1000. Most of this was review. We also did several pages of CWP, finishing up fractions and getting most of the way through area and perimeter. Tornado Boy loves CWP time.

Reading: He read Benjamin Franklin of Old Philadelphia two weeks ago when all this was originally assigned. It's a library book, so I had him read it on our way to get Keiko (4 hour drive). He finished it pretty quickly and liked the book, as I thought he would.

Grammar: We did some usage lessons in R&S this week: raise vs. rise, lay vs. lie, set vs. sit. These lessons were a good reminder to me as well. ;)

Writing: We started to do a rewrite of the Princess and the Pea for Unit 3 of IEW SWI-A. Unfortunately, the unit 3 thing just didn't make enough sense to me in this one. I pulled out the example outline and was thinking, "Huh?" So I've decided to shelve unit 3 until I get/watch Teaching the Classics. Perhaps that will help some. I think we will move on to Unit 4, which I can handle and Tornado Boy can handle. So in lieu of IEW this week, we did a R&S lesson on writing a report, which happened to use key words from multiple sources. He wrote a paragraph on Bobwhites (a type of quail). I didn't have him add any dressups or anything like that. He did ok.

Spelling: We did the review week 30 this week.

Latin: We did 2 lessons - puella (girl) and amo (love/like).

Read-Aloud: We started Johnny Tremain this week for Sonlight. We are at the part where he has just injured his hand very badly. We are also still working through I, Robot and should finish it this week. We're in the last "story". Tornado Boy is enjoying it, as am I. The little ones... not so much. They tend to fall asleep while reading. :)

Mischief during I, Robot

Bible: Still harmonizing the gospels. It's now the last week of Jesus' life. We also did Proverbs daily.

History: We read the Landmark book 2 weeks ago, so I can't remember the topic now. We also learned about the French and Indian war in the Story of the USA book.

Science: Skipped this week.

The Brute

Math: We practiced addition and subtraction within 20 this week, doing two exercises in the workbook and some mental math strips (the latter focused on facts within 10). We also finished Life of Fred Butterflies and started Cats.

Reading: We continued with Dancing Bears and did very well. We also worked on saying /ch/ properly, and his SLP also worked on that during speech therapy. He then told her toward the end, "Can we stop making that sound now?" :)

Writing: We did several new words in WRTR this week, writing them in print and cursive on a lap size white board.

Other: We finished Sonlight P4/5 week 13.

Mischief

Our biggest accomplishment was taking a NAP on Wednesday so he was pleasant in Bible class that night! :P I'm not really sure what Mischief did academically this week, as Tornado Boy was "teaching" him. He did join in on the WRTR lessons with The Brute, often saying the word before The Brute even tried. Sigh. I know at one point, he copied the word "stop", then sounded it out and told us it was "stop". Good job, kiddo!

Mischief writing/reading "stop"