Week 8 in Review (10/3/08)

We completed week 8 this week! It was a great success, although I can't say that any week thus far hasn't been. We are off to a great start of a year!


Bible Stories to Read and Pictures to Color- We did Genesis 22, Isaac is Offered
And 1 Samuel 1-7, Samuel Helps Eli
These weren't in the appropriate order but we got into a conversation that brought up the stories so we selected these to do this week. I am still thoroughly impressed with this program. It is well suited to all my children who enjoy coloring while I read the stories. Then we discuss the review questions and look up passages in the bible. They are doing quite well in retaining the stories this way.


Memorization- Our passage of the week is Psalm 101:1 "I will sing of your love and justice; to you, O Lord I will sing praise."

The children participate in Sunday Spectacular at church and they have a new passage each week to memorize. We continue that memorization in our schooling. Then on the following Sunday they recite it during church and receive a bible trading card (hand drawn by teen church members) that they can collect and later exchange for other items. This has been great motivation for the kids to learn their verses!

CLE Math 100 & 400-Grace(5) is mastering counting by 5's. 10's came easily, but 5's are proving to be a bit harder. She is also working on deciphering what type of math problem a story problem calls for, whether it is subtraction or addition.
Olivia (9) is working on adding fractions and place value beyond the decimal to the hundredths. She sailed right through these lessons.

SOTW vol. 1- We are doing Ancient Africa. The stories of Anansi were intriguing for the girls. They preferred the Ancient Chinese chapters over these but they were still enjoyable. We are not doing the activity guide so there might have been ideas in there to help this chapter along. They got the point of it and that was what mattered to me.


CKEB Science- We are studying plant reproduction and now trees. We went on some tree safaris looking for different types of trees. We are focusing specifically on coniferous and broad-leaved trees. The other three categories of trees are rare so we didn't spend much time on them. As long as they know they exist then we can move on to the types they are likely to encounter throughout their lives. Here is a depiction from Liv of the two types, followed by Grace's version (she was into circles that day).
CLE Language LTR and 400- Here is a sample from this week's spelling list for Olivia. We are adding extra emphasis on her spelling as that is an area she tends to not spend much time, and therefore struggle with. It must be working because the last two weeks her spelling scores have improved on the weekly tests.
Grace is trekking right along in Learning to Read. She can now read some of the directions and start parts of it on her own. She has memorized most of her sight words and is improving on her reading timed drills. If I can only get her to sound out words she doesn't know and not guess we will be doing even better!

McGraw Hill Health- We are working on the basics of the body. We used a different program that hit on this in second grade so we are now delving into it deeper. They are enjoying making life size diagrams of the bodies. I'll post those next week when we finish labeling them.
Spanish- We bi-passed Spanish this week. It got shuffled to the back of the list of to-do's. We will try harder to incorporate it next week.

Reading- We read about Parmele, a 100 year old town. It's a story about the importance of railroad lines. We also read about The Best Town in the World, another story set back a hundred years ago. It talks of how life was simpler and what made them think their town was simply the best. The girls really enjoyed both of these stories.

Geography- We are participating in a post card swap so we prepared an area on the wall to place our map. We should receive approximately 60 postcards from around the world over the course of the next several months, doing 3 a week. We got our postcards ready to be mailed and a system set up on how to track where we sent them to. I am super excited about this and can't wait to start researching all the wonderful places we get to see!

Extra Curricular- Tennis came to a close this week. Olivia enjoyed her brief introduction to it. Soccer starts next week and that is her favorite. Her sisters aren't old enough so they sit on the sidelines and make the best cheerleaders for her! Their time will come.

That wraps it up for us this week. Thanks for sticking with me through this long post (I got a little long winded). I hope your week was just as spectacular and you have a wonderful weekend!