Week 1 of 2008-2009 Weekly Report

Well we have completed our first week of the new school year. I won't say that is went off without a hitch :) No instead it went off with some complaining and tears. Oh well. We had just gotten back from vacation but needed to start right away so that we can take off time when the baby comes (which by the way is a girl! I am still stunned. I thought for sure we were going to have another boy).

The week for Turkey Lips included:

Bible Study for All Ages - we are completely half a lesson each day and that is going well.

Math U See Gamma - this is going well and we will also start drilling multiplication facts again next week.

Rod and Staff Grammar - this is the first time we have used this curriculum and so far we both like it. We started diagramming sentences (I never did that is school) and Turkey Lips enjoys it. He has met grammar with a positive attitude....this week :)

Spell To Write to Read - Turkey Lips took the placement test and that was all for the week.

Turtle Toes' week included:

Bible Study for All Ages
Math U See Primer - He really enjoys this and looks forward to doing it each day.
Spell to Write and Read - phonogram reviews and reading 2 BOB Books. We will start with the first list of words but that may or may not be next week.

We won't have a full schedule until August when we start our Tapestry of Grace Co-op. I'm very excited about it. We have 4 families participating and we are doing Year 2 unit 4 and Year 3 (not sure how far we will get yet)

I have been working on our scheduling a bit for the rest of the day and so far this is what I have come up with:

• No TV Monday - Thursday (our school week).
• Fridays Turkey Lips and Turtle Toes help me clean the house. The have always had chores but now they are going to help me clean the house and we are going to get the majority of it done block of time.
• Time in the afternoon to play a game or work on a project with me. I need this scheduled in because I tend to brush this aside.
• Time for the boys to work on a project on their own. This is also when I will be getting some of my projects done...well you know in a perfect world :)

Well I think that is all I have for right now. I'm kind of just writing this on the fly and I'm sure their are other things I want to add but they are escaping me at the moment. As the boys say "the baby is sucking out my brain" ha ha ha ha By the way Turkey Lips says that I look bigger than 20 weeks. I don't know how he knows that :). Also the boys have decided that the baby looks like Bossk from Star Wars. We had an ultra sound done and one of the 3-d pictures came out kind of funny. I told them never to tell her that!

Weeks 15 and 16 of Tapestry of Grace

The Northern Renaissance and The Reformation

Wow I forgot to post last week! :) School is going well. We have been learning about the Northern Renaissance and The Reformation. The highlight for the boys has been the art projects we have been doing. We have been learning about color temperature and then tints and shades. I've been amazed at the number of times these topics have come up in conversation.

"Mom are my pants a warm or cool color?"

"Look mom that is a shade of green"

It makes me giggle :-) They are just so darn cute! They have also enjoyed looking at the works from the different artists.

Turkey Lips thinks that Martin Luther was "a great man". I have to agree.

Math:

Going great :) I ordered our next books from Math U See and we will be starting those very soon. Turtle Toes is going to be so excited that he has a video too!

Spell To Write and Read:

I never thougth I would say it ... It's going great! Turkey Lips has done well on his last tests and the rules seem to be clicking. We are getting into a routine.... mostly it now makes sense to me :)

Turtle Toes has been memorizing the phonograms and is getting better at it. He is plugging away at the BOB books. He loves those books :)

Grammar:

We are picking up the pace with grammar and writing. The goal is to be ready to start TOG Writing Aids level 3 by next school year. I think Turkey Lips is ready I just need to chart out the course. I am going to speed up FLL 2 a little bit (which should be just fine) and then start having him do a little bit more writing each day.

Well I think that gives a brief over view of school here the last two weeks. We have had alot of fun. We've been joking around and I have seen Turkey Lips' sense of humor pop out more than once :) He has the same sense of humor as his dad. Those of you who know my honey know that means that soon Turkey Lips will be famous for his comments too. YIKES

Another interesting thing that has started to happen is Turkey Lips has started making observations about my behavior. So far has been is a respectful way. It has been in regards to lessons we are learning at devotion time. So speaking nicely, being generous with time etc. You get the picture... he is calling it like he sees it and mostly he has been right. It is a whole new level of accountability. Am I ready for that?

I'm looking closely into Real Science for Kids for chemistry and biology next year and I'm also looking for resources for art history study (picture study). If you have any ideas, advice, or review I'd love to hear them.

Have a wonderful week!

Week 11

My weekly posts are happening later in the week because our school week starts on Tuesday because we have co-op on Monday. That means I procrastinate and plan my week on Monday evening or afternoon :) and I do my weekly report when I plan school. So why, you ask, is this report going up on Wednesday..........I have no excuse :)

Week 11 started unit 2 for TOG.

Turkey lips read "Clown of God" and did the literature worksheet that went with it.

This was the first week that I had him read his literature assignment as his outloud reading for the day. I normally read the book outloud. Now why I didn't have him do it I don't know but I am meeting some resistance from him. He wants me to read the book because it is "too long". This too shall pass :)

We read a section from this book on Leonardo Da Vinci. Turkey Lips and Turtle Toes were quite impressed that a famous artist was named after a ninja turtle. I spent a little bit of time explaining it was the other way around. None the less in their minds it gave more credibility to Leonard Da Vinci that a ninja turtle had the same name. :)

Our activity this week was very simple. We have started studying the color wheel. This week we colored in the primary colors.

Turkey Lips started reading the second Boxcar Children book for outloud reading and he has also started reading for 20 min during his rest time. This week he picked a book about the Titanic.

Math - ugggg. It is going ok but with column addition Turkey Lips is discovering that he really has to take his time and recheck his work for simple mistakes.

We read "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" for our FIAR book for Turtle Toes. We haven't done any activities with it but we did read the book each day!

The highlight of the week has been reading Bartholomew's Passage, our Christmas lapbook (from Hands of a Child) and our Jesse Tree for advent.

Jesse Tree has been great. Both of the boys enjoy the reading, singing and the fire....er.. I mean candles :) They ask about each night. I think we should try to do something like this once each week during the rest of the year!

I am busy sewing still and made a bag for myself :) and I also finished up all of the bags that I am giving as gifts. My sewing area reflects the sewing that has been going on. I have a few little things I would still like to work on.

Last night we had some shopping to do.

One warm coat $30.

Two warm sweat suits $3o.

Three warm shirts $30.

Warm socks and a warm drink $12.

Going back for a Colorado Christmas..... Priceless

Week 8 Report

We are in the middle of week 9 right now but I haven't posted our week 8 report and I'm trying to keep up to date on our reports.

For week 8 we finished up Turkey Lips' castle

Honey told Turkey Lips that he would definitely get an "A" on this project and Turkey Lips just looked at him not understanding what he meant. :) So far I don't grade anything that they know about. I do put in grades for math tests and spelling tests but they never see the grades. However I do think he did A+ work on this one.

I don't have any other pictures for week 8 but we moved along in Math and Turkey Lips is doing well. I do have to have him go back and rework some problems only because they are very messy and he is unable to read what he has written.

Turkey Lips enjoyed our literature book for the week, The Minstrel in the Tower. We read it through and he did the TOG worksheet and then asked if I would read it again. Then he read a few chapters on his own.

SWR is slow goin :( I need to work in more ways of practicing the words. Turkey Lips gets frustrated and says "I know how to spell the words and then I get to the test and I don't know how". He seems to be right because alot the time when we review the words orally he gets them right.

We have fallen behind in our individual work so I need to keep on top of that.

So far I have learned that I need to just focus on that day and take little "bites" at a time and then by the end of the week we have "eaten the elephant" :)

Well this is a short report but in a couple of days I will be reporting on this week :)

Week 7 and our off week...

It has been three weeks since I have posted a weekly report. We spread TOG week 7 over two weeks and then we had a week off from school. I am going to combine those three weeks into one report. :)

Turkey Lips decided that he wanted to do one big project for week 7. He found a castle to build in a book we checked out from the library.

(sorry for the sideways picture) We had to roll newspaper around a broom handle and then saw the newspaper into sections to be used for the towers. Then Turkey Lips and Honey worked on cutting out walls. Finally it was ready to be taken outside and spray painted. Turkey Lips used some of his money to buy medieval knights for his castle. He wants to build a church, cottages, and a catapult still. He also wants to add some other colors to the castle so that it isn't solid gray.

For science we blasted off to the moon. I had the boys sit on the couch sideways with me and we pretended we were in a space shuttle blasting off to the moon. We spent the week on the moon and learned about the moonscape and lunar eclipses. ( I have a pattern for astronaut helmets and am hoping to sew them this week) We made our own moonscape with plaster of paris and let it set up a bit and then dropped rocks into it from above. Then we used a flashlight, baseball and golf ball to simulate a lunar eclipse. We were also able to look at some neat pictures on the Internet of space. One of the pictures showed a crescent earth. The boys thought that was very neat. There was more school than that (I promise ;) I just can't remember it all right now.

Last week we took the week off and I had a few crafts planned to do with the boys. We didn't get to them all but we attempted three....accomplished two...loved one.

1. We marbled paper

We are going to use this paper for Christmas presents but I won't give any more details just in case the fam is reading :)

2. We tried to bubble paint. It didn't work we just ended up with splattered paint.

3. We painted rocks.

My Dad was also here to visit for our week off and we fun with him here. He and the boys spent some time in the pool and we also had a pajama run one evening for ice cream. :)

One last event happened over our last three weeks. My Sister in Law had her baby. She had a difficult labor but all are well now and SIL is recovering. What a beautiful baby. She was born on a Tuesday. The boys and I were trying to do school while we were waiting for the call that she had been born. When my cell phone rang both boys shot out of their chairs and began dancing around the room yelling "she's here, she's here, she's here" Their chanting promptly ended when they realized "we won't see our new cousin till Christmas" I'm blessed with two rowdy boys with tender hearts.

Week 5

We had another good week. We started studying the Vikings this week. We will finish this up on Tuesday of next week and then we will start our study of Knights. There are just a few more projects that we want to do on the Vikings before we are ready to pack it away.

Turtle Toes:

I am still trying to find a rhythm with Turtle Toes and Five in a Row. We read The Salamander Room this week and he really liked the book. I'm just trying to find a better way to fit it in our day. He still enjoys Making Math Meaningful and it looks like sometime after Christmas I will be ordering the Primer for Math U See and starting that with him.

His memorization is going well. He memorized quite a few verses from Sword Fighting and he has almost completed True Nobility by Edgar Guest. He has also memorized all of the linking verbs...no this wasn't required he thought Turkey and I were having to much fun chanting them so he joined in.

He likes Phonics Pathways because he can actually sound out real words instead of just drilling phonograms with SWR so I am combining both.

He likes classical music and right now he really likes Vivaldi.

Turkey Lips

SWR is going well. We are doing one list a week and this week he only missed one word although later I asked him orally how to spell it and he got it right. I had read on the WTM boards about quizzing them during the week orally and that has worked well this week.

Math U See is moving along. We worked on regrouping this week and he understood so we are moving forward.

Handwriting is difficult to fit in. Turkey wanted to start learning cursive so we have started that however I am going to have to carve out sometime at least twice a week to sit down with him and work on it. I was trying to have him work on it independently but that isn't working.

Memorization is the same a Turtle above.

TOG is going great. We are having alot of fun with it and the boys are enjoying it.

Geography is also going well. We are still listening to geography songs at circle time and we are also working our way through a small book on geography that I picked up. It looks like we will finish that up soon and I am looking at Beautiful Feet's Geography Guide and using Paddle to the Sea. I am still looking into it. If anyone has in ideas or input on it I would appreciate hearing what you have to say.

Well I think that is it for now. I am going to start planning for next week.

Week 3

I am giving our report for week 3 now even though we will start week 4 tomorrow.

We had a busy week last week and have had Nanny and Gramps here visiting for Labor Day. Thanks to Jessica at Trivium Academy http://triviumacademy.blogspot.com/ She has designed the graphic above and the Weekly Reporter button on the side column. They are for all of the families that are reporting from their homeschools each week. I think this is great because it is motivation and encouragement all in one. If you go to Jessica's site you will find in the side bar links to all of the other blogs for weekly reports.

For week three we were studying BarBar, To Duet or not to Duet for FIAR and Byzantine Empire and Rise of Islam for Tapestry of Grace. We fit 5 days of school into 3 days this week. (Don't want to do that again!). However I think that for FIAR we are going to go ahead and row BarBar again this week.

Turkey Lips:

He did 40 words this week for SWR. I had a better understanding of SWR thanks to the ladies on the Well Trained Mind board.



Math U See is going well. He is working on estimating and seemed to catch right on. He does get a little bit confused with the names of different operations. For example and inequality and estimating. He knows how to do both but doesn't necessarily know the names of each operation.



Geography - so far he has the southern, northern, and eastern borders memorized.



Memorization - he is working on a poem called True Nobility by Edgar Guest (I found this poem on Jessica's blog)



TOG - as the pictures showed above we started working on domes. The domes are for the mosque we built. I will have to post pictures of the finished mosque later this week.





Turtle Toes



He is still enjoying Making Math Meaningful. We are zipping through the lessons because he wants to do it so often.



SWR - Turtle is working on memorizing the single letter phonograms. I am also having/letting :) him watch the Leap Pad video called The Letter Factory to help reinforce the sounds.



FIAR - We didn't get to spend as much time on BarBar as I wanted to this week so we are going to continue it this week. I was able to find a great cd called Beethoven's Wig. It has the Surprise Symphony by Haydn on it which is mentioned in BarBar.



TOG - He liked getting to work with paper mache too :)



Ok so that was our week. This week should be great too!

My strength comes from the Lord the Maker of heaven and earth. (Week 2)

I know that the school week isn't officially over yet but I had some extra time (all the boys are watching Star Wars) and thought I would go ahead and post. This week has been a great week. However it didn't start that way on Monday. It wasn't the boys or anything it was just me and "my stuff" and I was just having a bad day. I spent most of the day repeating to myself "My strength comes from the Lord the Maker of heaven and earth." Obviously my day was going to improve just based on the fact I was meditating on scripture. That has stuck with me the whole week and I know that our week was so good because I wasn't relying on myself to get it all done. We completed each days worth of work and even had time to be silly :)

So now for that actual school update. Tweaking our TOG schedule worked. Focusing more on hands on projects and structuring our learning around them worked.

Highlights of the week:

Turkey Lips

1. We finished up reviewing math from last year and started his new math book this week. (note to self ... don't stop math during summer break..even if it is a short summer break ;0 ) He was able to finish two lessons so far this week.

2. The TOG writing assignment was to cover pronouns and make a list of pronouns. We have covered pronouns last year in FLL and so we reviewed a bit and then Turkey Lips wrote sentences on the white board (big hit) and noted all of the nouns and pronouns. We also covered the four types of sentences. He likes getting to practice the command sentences because he gets to tell me what to do without getting in trouble :) The right side of the board has a memory verse that we are all working on.

3. Turkey is doing well with Spell to Write and Read but I am having a hard time understanding it myself. I am hoping to spend more time in it this weekend to get a better handle on it.

4. Turkey made some great projects this week. I will post those at the bottom along with Turtle Toes'

5. We started a science club this week and both boys had a great time.

Turtle Toes

1. He started Making Math Meaningful and now tells daddy each night about what he did for math.

2. He has more fun with FIAR when Cayman does it with us. Since Cayman likes doing it too (seems to migrate over when I start FIAR with Turtle) we all do FIAR and TOG :) Oh well I guess it is a good problem to have. They both enjoyed this weeks book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge.

3. We are working more with phonics with SWR but same thing as above I need to spend some more time with it.

4. Turtle likes to draw letters on the white board.

Ok so now for the pictures from the week:

Turkey Lips' mosaic. We are learning about the Byzantine Empire and one of the art forms they practiced was mosaics. Turkey's is a mosaic of oceans waves and a setting sun.

Both boys are working on their medieval books. After working on them they decided they didn't want to be monks and they didn't like the monks' hair dos.

Turtle Toes sewing up his book.

The finished product.

Turkey Lips sewing up his book.

This was the page he liked the most.

Pictures from rowing The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.

Turkey Lips and Turtle Toes I had a great week learning with you!!!!