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07 December 2012

Weekly Wrap-up: a good week

It's been a busy week, but a good one. Our house is on the market, but nobody has come to look so far. On the one hand, that's a bummer; on the other, it lets us get more stuff done so that it should be more ready. And I get time to practice keeping things really clean. I don't love that practice, but it's good for me.

We're getting closer to being ready for the baby to come. I need some socks and a few long-sleeve onseis (the boys were both summer babies, so I don't have any with long sleeves), and we'll be set for newborn clothes. I don't have a dresser at this point, but if the house doesn't sell we have hatched a plan to have a bedroom for our baby. It'll mean that the kids are upstairs and we are downstairs, and I hate that, but if we can't sell then we'll have to do something. In the mean time, I'm starting to think about what needs to go into my bag for the hospital and onto my playlist for labor. And I need to decide on a going home outfit. Such a silly, unimportant thing, but I care anyway.



School has gone reasonably well too. Hero got cashed in his coupon for November's Book It! pizza early on this week (I didn't think to take pictures, but he was really happy with it), we made cookies, we did a bunch of math and finished off the Math Expressions 1st Grade vol. 1 book and started the second volume. I gave him the unit test as a pretest for the next unit and he tested out of about half of it. Happily I have the Grade 2 books on hand and ready to go. It'll be a bit, but if he continues to test out of half the materials it won't be that long.

We have been reading from Beowulf, and the boys both love it. I think that Dragon likes the rhythm of the words, but Hero is able to follow the story with a little explanation of some of the big words. We also have this narration to show for the rest of the week's history:


 
 


One of the reasons that school was such a success this week is that we actually managed to do both History and Science... in the same week. So we've got a really nice narration from Science as well. We've been working our way through Seymour Simon's book, The Solar System, and I'm having Hero narrate on each object that they cover. We'll continue to work on this narration next week. The pictures are ones that he's selected from the internet.



 
 
Hero is suddenly flying through the lessons in All About Spelling, and while the writing is still challenging, the words are spelled correctly.



We're still working on writing, and it's getting better. I keep reading that reversals are perfectly normal for six years old, so I am carefully not worrying about them. All the drawing that he's been doing is helping the fine motor skills, but I can see from the spelling work that we need to do more handwriting practice. And that's fine. Once we finish this trip through the alphabet my plan is to do a combination of copywork and more focused practice on problem letters. We'll continue like that for as long as it takes to get the letters solid.




Of course, what the big guy does, the little guy needs to do as well, so he had a spider paper that he worked on too. I was really quite surprised at how well he did. Dragon watched carefully to see what Hero was doing, and then he tried to do the same. He didn't quite manage to make an S, but he did make something that looked very much like a 6. He then colored in and around it, but you can still kind of see it. I was impressed.


 
 
 
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5 comments:

Hwee said...

Wow, congratulation on the impending arrival of your baby girl. How exciting! The narrations have been very well done, and I think most boys tend to struggle with handwriting, but yours seem to be doing fine. Looks like you've got loads done this week, in spite of all the other tasks you have going on. :-)

Lisa Boyle said...

Congratulations on your soon-to-be newest arrival! :-) Having a new baby and selling your home-- two very big stressors. You seem to be handling them so well! I am so incredibly impressed that you are reading Beowulf to your children. Wow! I read that in high school. Thanks for visiting my blog and for your kind comments. I hope you have a great weekend! :-)

Ritsumei said...

Well, to be fair, we are reading a kiddy version of Beowulf, a retelling by Ian Serraillier. It's a lovely version, in verse, and I read that it even preserves some of the literary devices that were used in the original, but this is the first time I've read it in any version. We're not doing anything fancy with it, just enjoying the beautiful language.

Anonymous said...

Hi, thanks for visiting my blog. We're just finishing Beowulf and my guys have had a ball. There's a nice 30 min dvd of Beowulf which is suitable for younger students. Have a great Christmas!

MommytheTeacher said...

Wow! Thanks for sharing. the pictures of your kids are adorable and you guys did get a lot in this week. Our home school is still in its "shaping" up phase but you are doing a lot of great things with your boys. Congratulations on the soon coming girl. I have two of those and Hubby says we're done.:)

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