Weekly Report: Week Twenty-Eight (days 136-140)

EG
Perhaps the biggest news in homeschool-land is that we’re switching math programs. EG recently finished Life of Fred Advanced Algebra and the accompany Home Companion, so we had not planned on her starting the next LoF book immediately as it was. However, LoF will no longer be her primary math program. She’s requested that she continue to use it for review (she does review math on the weekends and thoroughout the summer), and we’re happy for that to occur, but it will no longer be her first exposure to a topic. The plan for the remainder of the schoolyear had been to utilize Patty Paper Geometry as a pre-geometry course, to finish working through Real World Algebra, and to take the online Art of Problem Solving course Introduction to Counting and Probability. None of that has changed. That gives me at least two months to create a new trajectory.
EG had a good week; she finished all of her work just a bit early. Hello there, February growth spurt of the brain. It’s time to find something to challenge her. I think we’re going to increase what she’s doing for German through either The Learnables or powerspeaK. The Learnables is my first choice, but we have to investigate how we’ll trick the Mac into playing the Windows-only CD. I’m perplexed that in today’s day and age, major curricula providers would still have products compatible with just one operating system.

FB
The biggest news in FB-land is probably his increasing fluency with reading. I suspect he could skip lessons in OPGTR, but we’re continuing to go through it systematically. I have him working on reading from three angles at present (a reader each day, a story from McGuffey’s Primer, and OPGTR); I haven’t gone back to Explode the Code since he’s now doing spelling via Spelling Workout.
He learned more about ancient China this week, specifically Confucius, and also played with tangrams for awhile. He also played with several of the Thames & Kosmos Little Labs this week.