Weekly Report

What a long day. I almost feel too tired to do this, but I am determined. First off, we didn't do any schooling today because we had to drive to Toronto for Roo's opthamologist appointment. The opthamologist suggested getting her a Nintendo DS to play while patching her eye. As you can guess, she wasn't too upset by that suggestion;)  Then we spent a few hours with a friend up there and left to come home, hoping to miss the traffic. No such luck, we hit the traffic so it was stop and start for a large part of the way and it made me car sick. On the way home we were passing the city where my husband likes to "visit" the music/instrument store there and he asked if he could stop in for a quick minute. We ended up sitting in the car for an hour while he did "business". I didn't want to bring Roo in the store because she has the constant need to try all the instruments and I really wasn't in the mood to chase her around the store the whole time. On the way home, I thought I had reached a point where my head was going to burst. My husband was belting out TNT along with the radio, while Roo thought she needed to talk extra loud over the top of dads singing so she could share her informative lecture on hibernation.......you can imagine the relief I felt when I saw the city limits sign.

This week we focused a lot on phonics review. We went back through a lot of older lessons in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading as well as we started reading the McGuffey Reader 1 as a change.  I also pulled out the big magnetic letters to do review as well, going over the rules and then getting her to spell them out seems to reinforce them better. I don't have a spot to put the letters up on aside form the fridge which isn't convenient for lessons. So I brought in a cookie sheet, propped it against the white board and we used that. We finished spelling lesson 10 which focused on filling in the blanks and rhyming words. She kept picking words that rhymed, but were not in the list words, so I had to keep explaining that the answer was in the list of words that was in the margin.

Cookie sheet letter board.

In math we completed 3 lessons and some fact review yesterday. We learned about dividing objects in half, skip counting by twos and we played store with money (dime and pennies). I find that sometimes she gets so into building things with her manipulatives that she loses track of what she is actually supposed to be doing, but I think that adding 2 to facts clicked this week. When we were going through them she looked at me and said "oh, it's like skipping one" and from then on she figured out the plus 2 facts without using any counters.









Geography is still her favorite subject, although we only do it twice a week. We went over the continents this week,  but focused on North America, what animals live there, and what oceans surround it. Art class was super fun. The kids made super hero costumes and then ran around playing bat tag, and hide and go bat. The capes were made from pillow cases that they drew on with fabric markers, then they made a mask and a necklace/breast plate that had their super hero symbol on it. Roo was Bat Girl as seen below.










Art class day was the first morning that you could actually feel the spring in the air. although it was still cold, the sun had that little bit of warmth to it that lets you know winter is almost done.

Spring is in the air!

I finally received my Song School Latin book this week as well. It took awhile, but I am so excited. I almost don't want to wait until next year, but I'm going to. Another book that I can input the lessons into My Year at a Glance schedule I am working on. It's immensely satisfying to see it coming together slowly but surely. I have not completed my About Us page yet like I said I would, but I did begin my books page. On this page I plan on keeping a running list of our read alouds. We just started James and the Giant Peach a few days ago. She seems to be really enjoying this one so far. All in all it was a good but long week. It's supposed to be warm and sunny this weekend, so I hope we can do something fun.