Weekly Report: Week Twenty-Three

EG is zipping through her work. She's done this to me for three Februaries running now; I'm quite certain it's somehow linked to her half-birthday, but it means that suddenly mid-year I must figure out how to get her work back up to the "challenge" level. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn't fully prepared for it.

EG is still doing well with math. Drill each day, one lesson in Beginning Algebra each day, and I've started giving her an assignment that just says "By Today" on Friday. Right now, that's in Key to Percents, and it's up to her if she spreads the pages out or does them all in one go. Sometimes she'll do them on Sunday afternoon; this week she did them (about six pages) on Wednesday afternoon.

This week for history, she read about the end of World War II, and wrote her summary about the atomic bomb. She read a biography of FDR, as well as Battle in the Arctic Seas and The Great Escape. Science is two-stranded right now; on Tuesday, she completed Chapter 1.5 and part of Chapter 2 in Ellen McHenry's The Brain, and on Thursday, it was back to physics with more about force, motion, and energy.

Memory work is continuing to go very well. She's still working on an excerpt from "I Have A Dream," and is about to complete Level One of IEW's poetry memorization program. I think we're both excited to move to the "every other day" schedule. :) She also finished three lessons in Orbiting with Logic, about logical notation (which, she tells me, she doesn't particularly enjoy).

She completed two lessons, an exercise, and two portions of history for Lively Latin. She's still moving relatively fast, but the slower pace has been good for the vocabulary to cement, I think.

We still love MCT language arts! She's now finished the vocabulary book, and is moving rapidly through the other books as well. Despite the fast pace, I am glad we started with the Island level, if for no other reason than Sentence Island. I can see her using the concepts in her literature narrations and history summaries. She also finished two steps in AAS Level 5, which means we are on track to finish it... next week. Gulp. Level 6 has not been released yet! We will likely take the following week as a break, and then do some comprehensive review for a few weeks. Beyond that, I don't know... she does still need help with spelling, so dropping spelling altogether isn't a good option.

EG is also doing a short story class with Smrt Mama, so she worked on her timeline and discussed conflict and resolution. Finally, she read Escape from Warsaw and wrote a narration for it.


FB is making steady progress, too. He's ripping through Right Start A, which is what I expected, more or less. I like knowing that all of it will be reviewed in Right Start B, so if he doesn't completely internalize the meaning of "equilateral triangle," we're still good. EG likes to do pages in Miquon Orange with him. In fact, she told me the other day that she wished she had less schoolwork so that she could teach FB all of his subjects. I told her that wasn't necessary, but I am happy to let them play together with Miquon. (It was actually at EG's request that I bought it.) FB is also doing well, still, with writing, and I can see glimmers of progress with regard to phonics. He can read, albeit somewhat slow and painfully. He sounded out a consonant blend on his own this week, though!


PC is still being ferociously wild and sneaky. She is also the Queen, and if you don't believe her, just ask her siblings.