Friday, August 21, 2009

Weekly Report - Week 1

There are a bunch of homeschoolers out there that do a weekly report each Friday that lists, or highlights, their homeschooling for that week. I thought I'd do that, too. It would make a good record of what we've done and possibly make my monthly progress reports for our virtual academy easier to write.

This was our first week of the new school year. I was not, and am not, completely prepared to start school yet. So, we did a light week, only covering a few subjects. We'll add in additional subjects, probably one at a time, over the next few weeks.

Mika:


Language Arts -- Mika wrote a first draft for her first video project. Her assignment was to write the script for a newscast covering the first day of school. She was to include an anchor person, a reporter on location, and people to interview. She wrote a second draft, changing some wording and adding more detail on a later day.

Math -- Mika completed lesson 1 (each lesson is a week). It covered finding a fraction of a number and review of previously learned material. An example of the new mateiral is: find 3/8 of 32.

PE -- Playing outside, riding bikes, and a attending a birthday party at a gymnastics gym were Mika's pe for the week. She strained/sprained a muscle in her back at the party and spent a couple of days resting as a result.


Samuel:

Grammar -- We read through the introductory pages of Grammar Island. These pages talked about how our language is made up of parts of speech, parts of a sentence, phrases, and clauses. We also reviewed the names of the parts of speech and read about nouns.

Math -- Sam completed the test pages for Math-U-See Epsilon lessons 1-6. Because he knows most of epsilon's material already, he is reviewing by doing the test pages only. I'll teach lessons on the whiteboard when we come to the few concepts that are new.

Home Ec -- Sam practiced cracking eggs. He cooked, with help, hard-boiled eggs which we used for egg salad sandwiches and deviled eggs. He also made us all a dinner of french toast and scrambled eggs one night.

PE -- Sam completed 4 hours of taekwondo this week. He's currently a high red belt.


Both kids:

Problem Solving -- We introduced the first five problem solving techniques which were: find a pattern, make an organized list, draw a picture, make a table, and work backwards. We worked through an example problem for each technique. We're using the Math Olympiad Contest Problems for Elementary and Middle Schools as our guide. It's designed for 4th - 8th grade mathy kids and is quite difficult. I certainly can't answer many most of the problems without the solutions in the back. Hopefully, we'll all be much better at problem solving by the end of the year!

Logic -- We worked through our first four Venn diagram perplexors. The first one had us stumped but we're doing better already.

Science -- We've completed half of our dinosaur chapter in Exploring Creation with Zoology 3. We have three chapters leftover from last year. Along with reading, we completed a "Try This" activity where we got two baggies, filled them with leaves, and added rocks to one of them. Then we mushed them all around to find out which baggie would "digest" the leaves better. It was a lesson on gastroliths.

History -- We listened to chapter 1 of Story of the World Volume 2. It reviewed the Roman Empire and the fall of Rome. We also completed the corresponding map page and a coloring page of a barbarian.

Reading -- We're listening to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on CD. Both kids have working their way through the Warriors series. They both love the books and are ripping right through them. Mika has a "fan fiction" blog, for lack of a better term, based on the series, and both kids spend a lot of time discussing the books.

Joshua:

Preschool Prep -- Our themes were the letter A, number 1, squares, and cows. We did some coloring, made A's, 1's, and squares out of play dough, recited Hey Diddle Diddle, sang a cow song, watched Click Clack Moo: Cows that Type on DVD, and read a few cow themed picture books. Josh's favorite activity of the week was making a cow out of construction paper squares and practicing cutting paper.


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6 Comments:

Paige said...

Looks like a good first week, thanks for sharing it.

Audrey said...

Looks like you had a good week!

Kerri said...

Great week. Hats off to you for schooling with a three week old. It took me a while to get back into the swing with our little one :)

Love the Home Ec "cracking eggs". I think I should give that a try with my boys.

Rachel said...

Great job! I am amazed you were able to do anything with a three week old.

cyn said...

For a "not quite ready to start" week- I think you did exceptionally well!
Sounds like it was a very fun, productive week.

Dacia's School said...

Wow sounds pretty productive to me