Weekly Report: Week Twenty-One

This was a good week.

Let me rephrase that: this was a really good week.

It was one of those weeks that you need to bottle up and save, so that you can open the bottle and remember it during the bad weeks. What made it so great? I'm not sure. I will say that we decided to ditch Classical Writing. Both EG and I felt like we were putting in a huge amount of time for very little, if any, gain. I spent a lot of my weekend listening to the new SWB mp3 talks on writing, and felt confident enough to toss it. So we did.

What did we do this week?

EG wrote a narration for The War of the Worlds (not an easy task), read Journey to America, and wrote a narration for it as well. (Look! Cross-curricular writing! We have time for it without Classical Writing!)

She did penmanship each day, and completed Steps 20, 21, and 22 in All About Spelling Level 5. She finished Grammar Island, started Practice Island, kept working through Building Language, and started both The Music of the Hemispheres and Sentence Island on Thursday.

EG did drill each day, but didn't pass any further levels; she also completed pages 13-16 in Key to Percents Book 1. She did Lessons 31 to 35 in Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, finishing up Chapter 4.

History this week covered Spain and Franco's rise to power as well as the start of World War II. She read a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as Children of Great Depression, and wrote her summary on Francisco Franco. (See! More cross-curricular writing!)

For Physics, she read Cool Stuff and How It Works, and started doing the workshops and experiments in Physics Workshop. She especially liked the sail car.

Latin is still proceeding well. I've built in one day a week for just review and vocabulary games online, which will slow her down a little more. She will still finish Lively Latin about six weeks before the end of the school year. She did pages 17, 18, and 19 in Orbiting with Logic and is close to having mastered the excerpt of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. She also did two Mind Benders puzzles in book B4.

All of this, plus thirty minutes of piano practice daily, thirty minutes of trumpet practice daily, and fifteen minutes of vision therapy on the computer daily. She also had stroke clinic Wednesday night (and tonight, since the Y was closed on Monday) and Master's Academy on Monday. MIL came to do Christmas with us Monday night, we went to the park on Tuesday, and EG had time to play lots with her siblings all week and even drag out her Snap Circuits for an hour or so.

As I said, a really good week.

FB worked on C, O, and G, and he actually does better making smaller letters rather than larger ones. We're still working on phonics. I think he's putting a little more effort into it but sometimes it is hard to say. Overall, though, I feel like he's making forward progress, and that's a Good Thing.

I put together my shopping list for 2010-2011, at least as far as curriculum resources go. It's actually pretty short: math, Latin, language arts, logic, and drawing skills. Then there are all the lines that just say "x books." History, science, art, you name it, plus science kits. Finally, there's the online courses, which we can't really purchase ahead. We're testing the online course thing later this year. I'm hoping it works, because I'd like for EG to take a few different courses next year.