Weekly Report: Week Three

The big news for the week happened on Saturday. I posted on facebook that it was the end of the world as I knew it, to paraphrase R.E.M. Why? Purple Child took her first steps. She was all of two days past the nine month mark. I admit, I had hoped for a later start date!




Fabulous Boy is making me somewhat crazy. It's clear he sees little to no use for phonics (or reading in general). After all, he has me, his father, and Eclectic Girl all to read to him, should he desire. He has a great deal of enthusiasm for handwriting, though, as well as his math. I do think FB thinks some of the math work is a bit silly (tally marks, for starters), but if I can rework anything to make it a game, then we have a winner. I also remembered this week that I have the Book-on-CD for Visual Perceptual Skill Building. I printed out the entirety of the mazes and he worked his way through them quite steadily.



FB has memorized three poems, and EG has memorized seven!

Both FB and EG were excited for the first day of Master's Academy. Our new co-op started this week as well. Here, they're getting ready for the first day at MAFA:




And here, they're exhausted from the first day at MAFA:





Eclectic Girl had a good week. She read Ghosts of the Civil War, If You Lived At the Time of the Civil War, Lincoln: A Photobiography, Caddie Woodlawn, and started its sequel, Magical Melons (it's my old copy, so yes, it just says Magical Melons on the cover!).

EG finished her review of fractions (she needed some review with adding & subtracting mixed numbers), and continued working in LoF: Decimals & Percents. She passed the Bridge to Chapter 11 on the first try: 100%! She also "beat" two different levels of math drill this week (we alternate between an addition/subtraction and a multiplication/division drill each day). It was a really great math week!

Grammar is still simply editing, but I can see it's getting easier for her to find each need correction. Spelling is still spelling. In Writing Tales, she finished Lesson 12 with a great retelling of "The Little Red Hen." Her next story to work with is "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

As might have been apparent from the reading selections above, we're quickly approaching the time of the Civil War in history. EG read Chapter 4 in Story of the World, and wrote a summary about Italy becoming a nation, along with the accompanying map work. In addition to her other memory work, she's got "The Charge of the Light Brigade" about 90 to 95% committed to memory.

Science lab was Thursday. I discovered that rather than reading the instructions, both of my pupils were constructing their circuits and the like merely by looking at the drawing of the finished product and attempting to replicate it. Needless to say, this meant that their first attempts just didn't work. After the cause of the trouble was discovered, though, things proceded nicely. Science, as you can see, is exciting.