Weekly Report: Week Thirty (days 146-150)

The weeks seem to just be rolling by... I am loving getting the infusion of new curriculum and I can't wait until the convention next week! Still, we're trying our darnedest to finish the year strong.

FB finished McGuffey's Primer, which he's been reading aloud to me at a rate of one selection per day! He's thrilled, especially since I told him we'd wait a week or two before we started the next book. He's still progressing steadily and somewhat rapidly through his other subjects & curricula: SWO A, WWE 1, Miquon Orange (just a few pages left!), Right Start B, and so forth. He continued learning about Caesar in history this week, we read several Let's Read and Find Out science books, and he's planning on experimenting up a storm while he & EG are at the grandparents' house this weekend.

EG is powering through her review of algebra using the Art of Problem Solving text. This is a great review for her and I absolutely love this text. I can't recommend it highly enough. She's actually just added a few new curricula in the last few weeks: Sentence Composing for Elementary School and Figuratively Speaking are two of them. The former is a little bit below her level but I wanted something structured to finish out the year as a good grammar & writing review, and this has fit the bill perfectly. She's doing on lesson of Figuratively Speaking a week, alongside continuing to use TIP's Growing Up Heroic. Literary analysis and terms are something we've largely skimmed over, so this is a good formal introduction. In science, we're taking a few weeks to do some in-depth study and discussion of evolution, including genetics. This week she read Evolution Revolution and wrote a summary for each of the four sections, plus did some other miscellaneous reading from Universe. She's planning on taking her Space Exploration science kit to the grandparents' house.

We stopped our day on Wednesday to watch Discovery land for the last time. I'm unaccountably sad about the approaching end of the shuttle program. I literally cannot remember a time when the shuttle program was not sending people into space (excepting the hiatus after Challenger, of course); my mother cannot remember a time when the US government was not sending people into space, exploring and experimenting and discovering. Ultimately, as my mother says, we are a nation that does not value education, learning, or life, and this is one of those instances where it is readily apparent.

PC is doing her level best to potty train. Alternatively, she's doing her best to wear every single pair of underwear that she owns. Ha! I am frantically scrambling to knit a shirt for FB's birthday (in two weeks). It's frantic because I initially ordered the yarn in January, there were myriad delays and lack of communication, and I finally received a refund and ordered it from another place late last week. I remain hopeful that I'll be able to get it accomplished. I'll be the frantically knitting one in Greenville...