Weekly School Summary - Maps (Sept. 5-9)

I respectfully ask that you not pin pictures of my children to Pinterest. Thank you!

 

We made it through our week 3! Woo-hoo!
Yup, those are the same words I started last week's school summary with. I'm sure I'll get to the point (hopefully) where I'm not amazed that we make it through a school week, but for now, I'm excited that we're getting schoolwork done, and we're not ready to kill each other.
I haven't even gotten a "Mo-o-m, do we HAVE to do school today?"
That makes me happy.

We finished our 3rd week of school but with our shortened weeks we've only completed 2 weeks of schoolwork. We started the week visiting family for the Labor Day holiday and then planned a field trip day for Friday. Here's where we're at:

Math: Both children are doing well. We're still in the review phase of previously learned concepts. Soprano feels very successful at math which is a great motivator. She's also enjoying the manipulatives that we use for her lessons.

Reading and Language Arts: Tenor had a little trouble with his first reading quiz. We had to discuss how they weren't looking for him to come up with his own synonyms or thoughts but to find that actual words used in the sample reading passage to answer the questions. Soprano is still struggling a little with Language Arts. I'm going to sit with her this week and actually "teach" her each day's lesson to see if that will help.

Electives:
The school computer is still down. :( We're just going to put Spanish on hold until it gets fixed or we decide to load it onto another computer.
The kids spent some time on freetypinggame.net for their typing instruction.
They did another health worksheet this week which consisted of coloring in the various phases of the bread cycle, cutting them out, then gluing them in the correct order on a piece of construction paper.
Tenor continued with reviewing and practicing cursive letters: Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, and Nn. Interestingly, there was a great article in our Sunday paper about how cursive writing instruction is dying out and how it's not taught as much in schools today. One of the arguments for continuing instruction said that some of our historical documents (ex. Declaration of Independence) are written in cursive and kids should be able to read them, as well as, be able to create a signature. I think it will help his overall handwriting legibility so we're going to continue with it.

Bible: Bass has taken over the Bible reading each morning before he leaves for work. We're continuing to use the Narrated Bible in Chronological Order (NIV).
We also read in various passages for our MFW studies that the good news is for all people, and
that in Heaven one day, we will worship God with people from all over the world!
We also read briefly about Judaism.

Geography: We discussed physical and political maps, local maps, and different kinds of maps. We drew a map of our community and the younglings "drove" a car following my directions to get to various local places on Wednesday. On Thursday, the younglings used a map that I drew to search for 'treasure' in the house. It actually took them a little longer than I thought it would but I purposely didn't include any key or written any labels to make it harder for them.

We really liked the "Maps and Globes" book but I think we'll be glad to move on past the basic geography info to studying different countries.

Science: Our nature walk got postponed as we dealt with a week of Tropical Storm Lee. (We live in the Northeast and had some major, major flooding in our county.) I finally had them write and illustrate something about the rain they observed from the living room window. Somewhat fitting since we had discussed the water cycle the day before. Soprano continued with her Farm Animal sheets from The Complete Book of Animals and finished them along with the Pet sheets.
They also finished their observations of the earthworm niche. It didn't go as well as expected perhaps because our worms were so tiny. But the soil, sand, and oats did mix together somewhat which was the projected outcome.

Other MFW: We continued with Wee Sing Around the World and made our world cake. Soprano begged to have Australia on it so we decided to ice the Eastern Hemisphere on our cake. It was pretty tasty!

Phys Ed.: With all the rain, the kids did some Wii Fit on Tuesday and got out for a soggy bike ride on Thursday.

Unfortunately, with all of the flooding and rain issues, our field trip didn't happen this week either. This time wasn't my fault though. The Hay Creek Festival Foundation completely cancelled the festival for this year. Understandably so. We had over 100 roads closed due to flooding, 1 water treatment plant completely flooded with 5 feet of water, and several nearby towns under a boil-water advisory.
We used our day off to relax, finish up a few things (like last week's Global Art project), and just hang out (and eat cake!)

Linking up to more reviews about MFW here!