Weekly Report: Week 9

It's been a busy week with all kinds of things getting in the way of our core school work. Monday is always busy between Mika's two-hour computer clubhouse class, Sam's taekwondo, and my weekly support group meeting. Tuesday morning was taken up with a field trip to the pumpkin patch. Thursday I had to go pick up my new glasses clear across town (actually in a different town) 15-20 minutes away. Today was busy with a doctor appointment and haircutting appointment today. Of course, the bulk of each day's work needed to be finished by 3:30pm so Sam could go to his taekwondo classes.

Mika:

Language Arts: Mika had 44 words for spelling this week and finally missed one, an easy one at that. She misspelled alley. It will be added to her list next week. In grammar, Mika finished reading the text which covered clauses. She then began analyzing sentences.

Math: Mika's math lessons covered multiplying fractions. She did fine with it.

Technology: Mika's computer clubhouse class covered Adobe Flash. They took blobs of color and made it transform into their names.


Sam:

Language Arts: Sam's spelling list contained 19 words. He got them all correct. In grammar, he began reading Sentence Island. He read the first two chapters which covered a review of the parts of speech, subject and predicate, direct and indirect objects, and subject compliments.

Math: Sam began Math-U-See Zeta this week and completed the first six lessons. It covered exponents, expanded and exponential notation, adding and subtracting decimal numbers, and the beginning of the metric system. The latter covered the origin of the metric system, the fact that the linear, liquid, and mass measures are interrelated, and the Greek prefixes.

Health and Fitness: Sam attended five hours of taekwondo instruction and will probably go to sparring class for two hours tomorrow morning.

Life Skills: We didn't get to our life skills lessons which covered baking cakes from scratch. Both recipes had large amounts of dairy so I have to find substitute recipes that can be easily converted. We'll probably try fitting in baking a cake this weekend.


Both:

Language Arts: I changed what we were doing for writing a bit this week. Rather than continuing to find resource paragraphs, I've switched to using the texts provided in the Student Writing Intensives. I've still teaching it, we're just using the provided sources. Mika is using level B and Sam is using level A. So, this week, Mika wrote a paragraph on Sea Wasps while Sam wrote about Sea Snakes. The lesson included using a which clause to combine sentences.

In reading, we discussed A New Coat for Anna over the course of three days. The first day, we all read it individually. The second day we spent half an hour discussing the history behind the book (World War II and the fact it was based on a true story) and the setting. Some of the questions we discussed whether it took place in the country or city, the amount of time that passed as the story progressed, the mood and whether it changed through the book, the types of people that the story is set among (ie. economic class, mood), and the importance of the setting to the story. By the end of the discussion, the kids indicated that they liked the story better with their new understanding of setting and the role it played in the book. The third day we discussed the two main characters in detail. We also briefly covered the plot and theme of the book.

History: We covered one chapter in history this week which discussed the beginnings of the Frankish empire.

Science: In science, we read the first half of chapter 2. It covered the characteristics of birds, bird watching, benefits of birds, identifying birds, using field guides, and field marks (ie. exterior anatomy of a bird) which went into detail on some of the sections of a bird. We played a game where I gave them my laptop which had a PDF file with 9 color photographs of different birds. I read off the description in our field guide and they had to try to figure out which bird I was describing. Given that each bird was pretty different, it wasn't hard but they had fun and asked if we could do it again. Maybe I'll try finding photos online of some birds that are more close in appearance and make it more challenging.

Fine Arts: Sam took it upon himself to go through our book's section on surface while I didn't have time to "teach" the lessons. (We were doing a test on Maddie's medicine which resulted in fussy nights.) I'll have to catch Mika up this weekend.