Weekly report Feb 1 - 5

This was one of those weeks where I constantly felt like we weren't getting things done. We started out exhausted - but for a good reason. The 5th grader had a gymnastics meet early on Sunday morning and qualified for the State Championship. We were very excited. If I can find my firewire cable, I'll post a video of her performance.

The 9th grader continues to enjoy Omnibus. We finished Tale of Two Cities this week and she is really enjoying Killer Angels. The reading load is getting heavy - about 150 pages a day between the two books plus her reading for other subjects. We should finish Traditional Logic in the next week and move on to Art of Argument. She is enjoying making the connections between her Logic work and her Geometry problems. She did this week's Chemistry lab while I was working with the 1st grader so I missed getting pictures. Why do I think she did that on purpose :-). Next week we start Reflections on the Revolution in France.

For 5th grade we started a new book for science. She is reading Amazing Leonardo da Vinci Inventions You Can Build Yourself. We just got started but the book looks great. She's already got her eye on projects coming up. Nothing this week as the reading was more of an introduction to da Vinci and the Renaissance. She wrote a couple of narrations for her readings. We are studying a few of his painting too. This week was the Mona Lisa. I was stunned by the 1st grader. I put a picture of the Mona Lisa on the wall and as she walked by she said - 'Hey Mom, that's the Mona Lisa. Its in a museum in France.' I nearly fell over and asked -'How do you know that?' 'Oh I saw it on Madeline.' LOL I guess TV isn't all bad. CW Poetry continues to be fun. We discussed meter, foot, breve, stress etc. This week's poem was Benjamin Franklin. It was pretty funny. The volume of writing is a lot less than Homer so she's enjoying the break - although I'm increasing the written narrations. Mean mom. Oh and in Life of Fred she started solving for X in simple algebraic equations like 13x+19+2x = 21x+1. Nothing complex but she thought it was fun.

The first grader had a decent week. She worked on place value up through the thousands, building and adding numbers up into the hundreds. She still uses manipulatives for the most part but is starting to understand the concepts well. She had been struggling with narrations but fortunately a friend reminded me to go back to WWE and see if I was unrealistic in my expectations. I was choosing selections that were far too long. It was much better

when I shortened what I expected her to narrate. We had finished our AO Year 1 readings and I

had been debating on how to proceed. I like AO but the 'oldness' of some of the books seemed to cut into the enjoyment. So I decided to start our Ancient Egypt studies and use Living Books Curriculum. I had many of the books already and the other looked very good. We started this week and it's just what I wanted for her. She is loving the engaging non-fiction books and I like how flexible and easy to use it is. We are learning the VP cards and reading SOTW along side. The science books especially are lots of fun