Weekly Wrap-up

Early in the week, we tried to get the last of our garden chores done before the snow came. It's been unseasonably warm, and it makes it feel like early fall, rather than late fall. I even briefly contemplated moving some strawberry plants, but decided that it's too late. Good thing I left them where they are: now we have snow on the ground. But it was a balmy 50F the day we worked in the garden.

Our Little Golden Dragon is struggling to get over a relapse of his bronchitis that he had a while back, but he's a trooper and is mostly cheerful most of the time. He and Monkey enjoyed an art project this week. They painted egg cartons, and Monkey has ambitions to turn his into a caterpillar. This is one of several crafts that Monkey thought up this week. It's fun to see him gaining enough confidence to think up his own crafts and then get them started! These caterpillars, being a painting craft, he had to ask for help. But one day this week I finished putting Dragon down for a nap and found him hard at work on a new folder game for us to use in phonics. We worked together to finish it off, then played with it right away. I need to find my contact paper and cover it, so that it will last through many games.

Speaking of phonics, it's going so well! We introduced the silent e this week, and Monkey had no problems with it. There for a while I felt like we were going sooo slowly, and wondered if we would ever get to the long vowel sounds, and now here we are! OPGTR actually breaks the silent e words into several lessons, but we covered a couple of them this week, in spite of not doing anything with it on Monday and Tuesday. We used a "magic e machine" (a cardstock frame we put the CVC words into to change the vowel sound) and his new folder game to practice. I just love hiding our phonics drill in games. We'd have fights over it every day if it wasn't for Happy Phonics and the other games we play!

In History, we covered Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as Joseph in Egypt. We also had a look at the royal burials in Ur, since that's where Abraham came from. We were working with the Scripture Storybooks the Church puts out, since SOTW doesn't quite match up. Ur is pretty interesting. We spent some time exploring Queen Pu-Abi's tomb. Monkey didn't know what a lyre is, so I found a youtube clip to show him. It's Anglo-Saxon, not Sumerian, but it's the same general idea, and was enough that the picture made sense to him. We talked about the cylinder seals they used, and a little of what they used them for, then we used the clay that was leftover from making our cuneiform tablets to make a cylinder for Monkey and put a little cuneiform on it. Unfortunately, it was a short night last night, and so when I was putting Dragon down for his nap I passed out too... and the cylinder was burned black. We may make another one. Which would be OK. Turns out they had holes in them to string them onto pins and wore them. So if we do it again we'll try to make a hole through the middle (a needle maybe?) to make it more accurate. He had a great time working the clay and made quite the collection of little balls and even a turret while he was "getting it soft." The Sculpey being hard didn't seem to bother him much! In any case, we had a good time looking at pictures of cylinders, checking out Queen Pu-Abi's cylinder, and later I did some reading about them too. Interesting stuff.

 Here's his narration of the story of Joseph in Egypt. I'm thinking that we may look to see if Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is still on YouTube. A while back we watched it, since someone had helpfully put it all into a playlist.

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Joseph was a righteous man. He taught his brothers about his dream, and then they sold him some Ishmaelites. They took him to Egypt. Potiphar bought Joseph. He was happy that he had Joseph and he put him in charge of his whole house. Potifer’s wife tried to make him kiss her, but Joseph didn’t, and he ran away from her. Then Potiphar’s wife told Potiphar that he kissed her. He put Joseph in jail.


He got out of jail when the king put him in charge of his whole land. Joseph was supposed to give them food for the seven years of no food. His brothers came to buy food. He told them that he was Joseph because they didn’t know it at first. He told them to come to Egypt. They did it.

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Math is going awesome as well. Monkey's fine motor skills are starting to catch up a bit, so I started teaching him his numbers this week. Not too shabby, for the first official instruction. He decided that he likes the other kind of 4 - the one that's open on top - better than the one in the font, and I'm fine with that. In addition to learning to write the numbers, we continued to work on addition with sums to about 15. We also bumped into multiplication, played with some inequalities, and did some dot-to-dots. The choose-your-own adventure style math that Miquan suggests is working out beautifully! He's requesting certain types of sheets, which makes me happy since he's practicing his facts happily, and it makes him happy because he gets to choose what he wants. His choices are based on the decorations, which makes this very easy right now! We even discussed negative numbers just a little bit, courtesy of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, our current read-aloud: If Grandma Georgina is 78, and she eats 4 pills that each take 20 years from her life, how old is she? Why did she disappear? We used a number line, and it took 2 tries to explain it, but I think he followed the logic of the negative numbers. He wasn't that interested, which is fine, but I think he got the concept. I like that.

Other than that, the main excitement in my week was getting nominated for the Homeschool Blog Awards - super exciting! (I'm under Variety and Methods.)  How was your week?