In addition to completing the Christmas card project, we have had a busy couple of weeks. An out of town swim meet. Holiday preparations. A fun visit from Grandpa and his two dogs. Yesterday I had a cleaning marathon and even managed to find time to clean all the dirty hand prints off the kitchen walls.
Oh, that's right...this weekly review is supposed to be about homeschooling. Thankfully we did get some of that done too! It wasn't easy, and we will be working much of this week to get caught up in a few things, but overall we've accomplished a lot for being almost halfway through our school year.
We are giving Wordsmith Apprentice another try. I had heard such great reviews of this program last year, and Anna seemed pretty happy with it, but I was confused about the purpose of some of the exercises. I set it aside but never could decide what to replace it with. And then for some reason we opened it up again a few weeks ago, and it seems to be going pretty well. We do two lessons a week, alternating with two pages from Outlining. On Monday/Wednesday she does Outling and Tuesday/Thursday she does Wordsmith Apprentice.
Zeta continues to go really well for Anna. She completed Lessons 4 - 6 in 6 days. She is speeding through this material right now, because it is stuff she had previously in Saxon 5/4 (and thankfully still remembers).
Latin, on the other hand, did not go as well. She really needs a consistent schedule to stay motivated and on track with Latin, and the last two weeks have been anything but consistent. So we will spend a third week on Chapter 5!
Last week Anna participated for the first time in the Harmony Fine Arts Sketch Tuesday. She really enjoyed it, so we will try to make that a part of our regular routine.
Ryne:
Beta Boy continues to amaze us! He also completed three lessons in the last two weeks. One day he had finished the last page of the lesson and kept working into the next lesson. I didn't realize he had moved ahead until he was done with the first page. I went ahead and checked his work and it was 100% correct, and we hadn't even watched the video yet. We went ahead and watched the video anyway, and then I gave him the test and he got a 100% again.
We've started reading Christian Liberty's Nature Reader 3. I fell in love with these books when Anna went to Christian Liberty Academy for Kindergarten and 1st Grade. It's fun to read them all over again with Ryne.
After the holidays I will have to write about First Language Lessons. Ryne does so well with this program and it is one of the highlights of our homeschool day.
Grace:
Gracie is working on adding 9's in MUS Alpha. She is moving at a snail's pace with this lesson, but she is making progress. We will camp in this lesson for a while.
Gracie is working on adding 9's in MUS Alpha. She is moving at a snail's pace with this lesson, but she is making progress. We will camp in this lesson for a while.
Reading was the subject that got pushed aside with Gracie. We only did about half of her lessons in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. She did however read a whole book to me the other night. It was a Strawberry Shortcake book (no, not the highest quality of literature) that ironically was the first book Anna read to me as well.
Other:
Below are our favorite books from the last two weeks.
Finally, a highlight from Week 16 was a Christmas Party with some homeschool friends. The kids decorated sugar cookies and then delivered them to a local nursing home and sang carols to the residents. It was a wonderful morning!
Happy Homeschooling (or have a great break if you're done for 2008)!
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