Since my last post in October, we have not changed any curricula! Hooray!!!! This week went sooo well, so I'll go ahead and blog about it. :)
Tornado Boy
Math: He did 3.6 and 3.7 Problems and Exercises this week in AoPS Prealgebra. The big thing - he basically did them on his own. Yay! I was in the room, but I was busy doing something else. He just asked me for help a couple times, and that was it. He otherwise worked on his own, checked his own answers, etc. I'm so proud of him! This is an easier chapter for him, so he needs less handholding. I hear that Chapter 5 will need me again. :P
Literature: I gave Tornado Boy a pass on TOG literature the last several weeks. He was supposed to read The Wind in the Willows, which he got 3 chapters into and just couldn't take it. We've tried this book as an audio book a few years back and didn't get into it then either, so I'm just giving up. We don't enjoy the book, and he won't have a horrible education if he never reads it. ;) And then technically he was supposed to be reading Winnie the Pooh for TOG this week, and well, he's really above that book. He has read it before a year or so ago, but now at age 9, he'd rather read something a bit more mature. So I again let him skip it. I didn't replace it with Dialectic level literature because I don't think he's ready for the literary analysis at that level. So for these two books, I'm just giving him a breather from literature. He did, however, read a lot this week! Tuesday night, he asked me to download some books to his Kindle from the library's Overdrive. I discovered that our local library that we don't use as often as the big next-county-over library has different books on Overdrive from the other library system, so now we have a much larger selection of Kindle books. Yay! Tornado Boy was hoping for more Warriors books, but they don't have the particular series he's in (they have the first one and the one that comes after this series). He's also reading A Series of Unfortunate Events right now, and I was able to put the next book on hold. Then it dawned on me... He's 9. I could let him read Harry Potter! They had it available, so I downloaded the first book to his Kindle. The next morning, he pulled the physical book 2 off my bookshelf and read that. Then that night he asked me to put book 3 on his Kindle. :D Friday or Saturday, I went ahead and put 5, 6, and 7 on his Kindle, as he had read through book 4 by that time. He is a very fast reader, obviously! He is really enjoying HP, and he even built a wand shop out of Legos one morning. :) So we'll get back to classic literature later. Maybe the next TOG unit will have better literature choices than the last 2 books (previous weeks' choices were excellent).
Writing: We finished week 6 of Writing & Rhetoric book 1. His summary was a tad long, but not horrible. I'm not worrying about it much, as I think the instruction for summarizing in Writing With Skill 1 next year will be better (I'm going through that book myself right now). Since he tends to be a man of few words, I'm ok right now with summaries being long. It's usually like pulling teeth to get him to write more than the bare minimum!
Spelling: He completed Week 20 of R&S Spelling 4.
Latin: Monday, I gave him the Lesson 1-4 test. He scored a 98.5%!!!!! What really impressed me was when he was doing the bonus section, naming 5 English derivatives of the Latin vocabulary on that page. One of his words was "fenestration". My own vocabulary is fairly mediocre, so I had to look that word up to make sure it really was a word. :P Sure enough, it was! He then told me that defenestration started the 30 Years War. He learned that in SOTW. And he said that defenestration was a fancy word for throwing someone out a window. Ok, so Latin is going quite well, as is history, apparently! We started Lesson 5 on Tuesday, and I told him to do two pages per day (so a Lesson and Exercise page the first day). That first day, he did the lesson and exercise, then went ahead and did the history as well, since he loves the history sections. So he ended up doing Lesson 5.1, Exercise 5.1, history lesson, Lesson 5.2, Exercise 5.2, Word Power C.2, Word Power C.3, and another history lesson.
Read-Aloud: We finished Return to Howliday Inn this week (part of the Bunnicula series).
History: TOG threads are helpful in blogging about this! Tornado Boy learned about jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance, issues of racism in Amerca, Italy, and the USSR, learned about President Warren Harding, and learned about FDR's early political career.
Science: We didn't do science this week, though we did go see the Mythbusters in person at "Behind the Myths". That was very cool! We will probably do some science over our Christmas break.
The Brute
Math: We did through lesson 11 of CLE 204, then promptly LOST the LightUnit the very next day! Can't find it anywhere, and the school room is relatively clean. I have searched and searched. How did it get lost between his desk and his shelf right behind his desk chair? I have no idea. At any rate, we couldn't do CLE the rest of the week. We instead did Beast Academy 3A, where we were playing around with hundred charts and skip counting, including skip counting starting from a weird number. The Brute has done very well with Beast Academy so far. If I don't find the CLE LU over the Christmas break, I will bump him up to 205 and not worry about it. I think he'll be fine skipping some lessons.
Phonics/Reading: We started Unit 2 of R&S Phonics and Reading this week! I was terrified going in, because it is a huge jump in writing from Unit 1. The first day, he had a few instances of asking if he could just do part of it, but I said nope. You can do this. It's just filling in a few letters. ;) The next lesson was way more writing, but he didn't complain! I was shocked, to say the least. He also wrote fairly neatly, and letters are sitting on the line for the most part. We've really been working on that lately. I'm very proud of him! This unit also moves pretty fast at first. The first lesson in Phonics teaches long /A/ sound spelled a-e (review), ai-, and -ay. So he learned two new spellings that day. The next day, he learned long /E/ sound spelled ee (review), ae, and -e. So again, two new spellings. Then the 3rd day, he learned long /I/ sound spelled i-e (review), ie, and -y. Then the 4th day was the most new concepts - long /O/ sound spelled o-e (review), oa, oe, ow, and -o. So that's 4 new sounds that day! Big week! Next lesson will be long /U/ sound with one new spelling, but then most of the rest of this unit will deal with consonant blends he has experience with already. Phew! He is still enjoying the Phonics and Reading. The Reading includes some sight words, but I explain the phonics of them where possible. He loves the reader and is gaining confidence. The exercises in the workbook are fabulous for teaching him to really LOOK at the word instead of guessing based on the first letter or the shape of the word. Love it.
History: We read about Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, plus listened to their music.
Science: Skipped science, as mentioned above.
