Six Years Ago Today.............

Six years ago today I realized I could love beyond any thought or reason. It feels like yesterday you were a baby. Happy Birthday my Heart.



     

Birthdays, and Childbirth and Christmas Oh My!

What did we accomplish this week? That is is the million dollar question. Quick answer is not as much as I wanted to, but enough to get by. School wasn't included in that question. We did school, it was the other 9,000 things I wanted to get done. Then I blinked and the moment of motivation quickly disappeared as quick as it arrived. Roo's 6th birthday is next week and we promised her she could go to Build-a-Bear and pick out any doll and any outfit/accessory she wants. I am trying to talk her into this doll with this outfit or this one, but I don't think I have convinced her entirely. Today is my husbands birthday, in a few weeks the baby will be born and then we have Christmas. November and December are going to be expensive months for us for the rest of our lives, yikes.

Drumroll please, for what we did in school this week:

Memory Work - We worked on the poem from FLL, and Egyptian Pharaohs and Dynasties and for some reason she doesn't like to say Queen Hapshetsut.

Phonics - We learned about the apostrophe and plural words adding es and ies.

First Language Lessons (FLL) - We learned about the nouns of our address and postal code. She already knew the address, but postal code was a new concept for her.

Writing With Ease (WWE) - This week was split into two different stories. Davy Crockett and Sacagewea. The improvement of  her handwriting is getting quite noticeable but you have to remind her to slow down and take her time doing it otherwise is looks a mess and her letters float.

Latin (SSL) - We still focused on the sit, stand, write and repeat commands and today and yesterday were complete review days from the start of the book to where we are currently.

Math - Flash cards and drill sheets, flash cards and drill sheets.

French - Days, months and weather terms. We review these everyday and she can now answer basic questions about "What day is it?" or "What is the weather today?". I also picked up the French/English library book we had on hold. It is form the language learning storybook series and she loves these. Each page has the English part at the top with the french translation at the bottom. There is a pronunciation guide at the back and after a few weeks she generally has the whole thing memorized.



 

History - In history we studied The First Cities of India and The Mystery of the Mohenjo-Daro.

She calls this look her turtle neck smile. The turtle neck while doing map work.

Science - Barn/farm animals was our focus this week. We studied the pig, cow/bull and the goat.

Our farm diagram.

Art - For art we skipped the actual art lesson planned and she ventured out on her own and made a pirate ship for her dad for his birthday.





Notice how Abu is sitting in the "crows nest" and Cinderella is minding the cannon.

Can Zombies Homeschool?

This baby is kicking my butt this week. It's like it has superhuman powers that are draining my energy into itself. I swear those women that talk about how much they love being pregnant and how easy it is must be lying. I am mostly living in automatic robot mode, doing things mechanically until I get my energy and my brain back. I bet if you asked me my name right now, it would take at least 7 seconds of me staring at you blankly to finally be able to answer. We also had 10 billion doctor appointments this week as well for various things, follow ups etc. The one we had today was at a medical center a little over a mile away from home so we decided because it was actually a beautiful day today to walk home. My motive behind this was that Roo may potentially be quite tired after walking home and combined with getting up super early this morning and she may want to nap....I may have been able to finally have a nap (I don't think I have napped once during this pregnancy). So she decided to skip.the.whole.way.home and then proceeded to feed off this energy buzz for the rest of the day. So we achieved the opposite of my desired outcome and now I am hoping for a nice and easy transition into bed for her tonight. One can only hope. We did manage to school 5 days this week, even after all the appointments messing up our routine and attending the Remembrance day parade (pregnancy hormones and Remembrance Day parades don't mix well) It was a good thing I was wearing sunglasses.

What we achieved this week:

Memory Work - We worked on a new poem from FLL, and added in Egyptian Pharaohs. I had to search them all to verify the pronunciation though. I can't be giving incorrect information no matter how tired I am;)

Phonics - We have reached the 200's in the lessons of The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. We started learning contractions and apostrophes she grasped the concept very quick. I thought it was going to be more of a struggle than that.

First Language Lessons (FLL) - We are still learning about nouns and she began to memorize a new poem from there. I added it to our daily memory work.

Writing With Ease (WWE) - We started week (I think) the Charlottes Web Focused week. I am very happy with how her handwriting it becoming so much neater. I was even watching her deliberately going slow to ensure that her writing was as neat as she could do it.
\




Latin (Song School Latin) - We worked through the review chapter and then began a new chapter that focused on the commands sit, stand, write and repeat.





Math - The addition math facts up to 10 are coming along and we worked on a few drills and math work books that I had around. I think that maybe next week we will begin Singapore again at a slower pace and still keep up the facts and drills.




French - I introduced the months and now we are constant rotation of the days of the week, weather and months with one day a week being a full on review. She likes to lay out all of the flash cards and turn them into a game. This weeks game involved Polly Pockets and dice.

Notice the Polly Pockets? They made an appearance in the above photo as well.

History (SOTW) - We studied Gilgamesh. She is loving it, and I checked out the Ludmila Zeman versions of the Gilgamesh trilogy. On her Etch A Sketch she was drawing fast snapshot pictures of the story as I read it aloud to her. She loves the character Enkidu.




Science (Elemental Science) - We focused on water animals this week, walrus, dolphins and whales. We also did a quick experiment on how the plastic rings from drink packages get stuck on animals and the results.

This is from our science. The top photo is our habitat posters (we didn't do a diorama). The second photo is our food chart. 

Music - We worked on week 2 of Arcangelo Corelli and listened to several pieces while completing the are project.

On a personal level we finally installed her princess canopy thing over her bed. It only took a 2 months of daily reminders to accomplish this goal. Next thing, assemble the crib.

This is her "finally you finished it" face.

Weekly Report

How is it that when I cook, I always seem to have a reasonable amount of dishes that need to be cleaned. But when my husband cooks (even just for himself) the sink is completely full. How does one accomplish that? It's annoying and probably intensified due to pregnancy hormones, but annoying never the less. I am sitting here, drinking chocolate milk (to remedy severe heartburn) and listening to my daughter singing and making horse noises in bed not even close to sleeping. She is so going to be Mrs. Crankypants in the morning when I wake her for dance class. We had a successful week this week, even the day after Halloween which shocked me. It was a slow start on Monday and she stayed in her pajamas all day, but we got all our work done even though she wanted to do her work under the dining room table where she set up a house. It actually worked out quite well and she seemed to get through things much faster. Speaking of Halloween she chose to be a witch this year. The concept was based around the broom. She really wanted to carry the broom and wanted to know what her options were for costumes to go with it. Witch was the quick and easy one.

Doing work under the dining room table in her pj's.

I am just going to list below what we accomplished since it is late and I want to watch something I recorded on tv before I finish my book and attempt to sleep.

Memory Work -  Invertebrates and Oceans are memorized and we are still working on Periods of Egyptian History.

Phonics - In the OPTGR we have officially entered into the word contractions stage. Today I just gave an overview of that as well as  reviewed two syllable words.

Writing with Ease and First Language Lessons - We finished Week 9 in WWE in which I have noticed a huge jump in the neatness of her printing. In FLL we continued with different nouns, this week we focused on places and things.

Latin (Song School Latin)- The focus was on the latin words for house, door, wall and window as well as what first declensions are.

Math - Still fact review. We have changed it up a bit and played fact games using dice and "fishing" type games with magnets and fishing for facts. I can still see her counting the answer out in her head, but she is getting quicker. I also pulled out some unused fact worksheets from our Saxon 1 workbook to use (we switched from Saxon to Singapore this year). I refuse to move onto subtraction until we have got the addition down.

French - Counting, days of the week and weather terms were our focus. Each day we start with what day is it and what is it like outside.

Science - Our focus was on studying rabbits, armadillos and beavers. I think her favorite part is deciding what habitat each one lives in and gluing it to the correct poster as well as the eating chart. We also did an experiment from her science experiment box. It was to grow they coloured crystals which turned out well. they actually look like fancy drinks with lots of ice in the picture.




History - We learned about Hammurabi and his his code. She was a little shocked that some of the laws could end in maiming or a death sentence and I had to explain how is was back then.

Composer Study - We introduced Arcangelo Corelli, mapped where he was from, read his biography and listened to a few pieces from him.

Art - Has been postponed until this weekend because honestly we forgot and there isn't much planned this weekend anyway.

A nice fall day outing to collect leaves and feed the ducks.

The week was good and went by fast. I am still trying to get the house ready for the new baby which seems to be a extremely slow work in progress. Hopefully I will accomplish more this weekend.

Just Finish Something Already - Blog Hop

I would say better late than never, but since this is a blog hop about completing things I think I should feel slightly ashamed.
Small accomplishments count don't they? In that case my list is compiled of several small things that I actually didn't count as things finished until I sat and thought about it.

1. I finally tried out a ham, cheese and zucchini savory muffin recipe that I have been wanting to. I actually went out of the way to pick up the ingredients this weekend and cooked them Sunday morning.
2. I went through a pile of things that I no longer want and made a donate pile (just need to get hubby to drop it off) and pulled out a bunch of things I have started to list on Ebay to sell.
3. Put in several inter-library requests for books that I have been wanting to read.
4. I have slowly been starting to put myself to bed a little earlier. I wake up crabby regardless but I am hoping the slow increase will actually start to help me catch up on lost sleep. I don't sleep well. It seems that my deepest sleep happens to fall just before I get out of bed, so I wake up feeling completely unrested. I am much more of a night person, I just wish the rest of the world ran on the same schedule as me. Maybe someday they will;)

That's all I have this week. I promise to try harder next time. Good thing I didn't attempt to do NaNoWriMo this month. But yet I know better than that since I am missing the creative gene, it would take me forever to even write a Haiku.