September 9-13 Weekly Review

I got my planner in the mail on Monday of this week and was very excited and anxious to try it out. So far I really like it. There are two things I would change and that would be:

1. have a better way to open right up to the week I need instead of having to keep the planner open at all times
2. have a place to write little reminders of things I need for each day

Other than those.....its a really cool planner!! I love the design, and that it's spiral bound. I love how its designed just for homeschoolers too.


Here's what my 1st planned week looked like. I highlighted after completion, and circled when we didn't get a task completed for that day.

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 Together:

Like the weeks before: we pray, read from the Bible, do a little devotional, and read a Bible based story every day. Then we work on the calendar, and the daily learning notebooks together. The kids have really enjoyed these so far.

Other things we work on together:

Prairie Primer week 3:

We looked a little bit every day at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Country book. The kids enjoyed seeing pictures of what it was like to live back then and to see examples of things like the cabins and flowers talked about in the book. 

We learned about wasps stings and how to treat them. Once again I learned something too.......I learned not to pull a stinger out with tweezers but to scrape it with a card or knife because pulling the stinger out will release the venom into the body~my poor kids.

 Apologia Astronomy:

This week we started lesson 2 on the sun. We've learned a few interesting things about the sun:

1. if you stare into the sun, you can go blind and not even feel it because you dont have pain sensors in your eyes.  
2. if you were standing on Pluto it would still be dangerous to look into the sun 
3. the sun is like a big ball of fire that God put in the perfect place so that the earth would get just what it needs from the sun. 

We practiced doing these 2 things {revolving, and  rotating} and we all got a little dizzy. 

And for the fun part of this week, we melted chocolate with the sun, and a magnifying glass. All the kids enjoyed this!!

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This week went by really fast! We doubled up our work on Tuesday so that on Wednesday we could have mostly a free day~we still had to do just a little work.

I put tabs on the pages that we need to do and here's what the shelf looked like after lunch on Tuesday from doing double the work.

Thomas:

Thomas had a birthday this week!  He turned 9 years old. He did get to have a break on his big day, but he still worked the rest of the week.

 

• Thomas worked on his Life of Fred Math Apples book and is almost finished. This is usually the very first thing he wants to do from his workbox. He thinks Fred is funny and silly. He also worked on his Singapore math and is still reviewing what he learned last year. 
• He's learning capitalization rules and correct punctuation marks in his language lessons. 
• He's still working on learning the phonograms in All About Spelling, but almost has them all learned. The vowels are tricky! 
• In his reading program he's still on the biography genre, and is reading about Amelia Earheart. He likes that she's a little tom boy and is very brave. He is almost finished with this book and is excited to move on to the adventure books next.
•  In his cursive writing book, he's learning/learned the letters: r, i, t, u, and p {I think that's all so far~just going by memory}. 

 Nathaniel:
 Nathaniel insisted that since it was Thomas's birthday this week that he should get to have a day off too, so he decided to double up his work as well. 
We are focusing on his math and reading and he's in lesson 2 of Math U See Alpha. He watched the video that went with the lesson and said it was easy and went right to work writing the numbers 1-20. In his reading/phonics he's working on blends and reading 3 letter words. He's enjoying this program and feels confident in what he is assigned. To see him happy, makes me overly happy! He has different activities every day with his phonics...some days its reading, some days a game and even some cutting/pasting action!


Sarah: 
Sarah worked on the letter I this week. She had a lot of fun working and building. She has a few papers each day that I get ready for her to work on, some days 1 is enough and other days its 5 or 6.
 I put Sarah's papers in this shelf on these trays and she pulls them as she wants to do them.

 Then once she's finished I hang them up on display.

She takes her work seriously!

Extras:

This is what the school room looks like after we've been working all day.

Sarah and Hattie playing in the floor.

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 We started a homeschool co-op this week also, and the kids had a lot of fun! Thomas is taking a spanish cooking class and a science class;Nathaniel has a writing/art class and a science/math class. Sarah is in the preschool class,and Hattie is in the nursery. After lunch, they have PE and the kids had a lot of fun with that too!