Sunday, October 18, 2009

Sixth Week of School Report

We actually got quite a bit of school accomplished this week. The Lambs were sick with colds-runny noses and mild fevers. Thankfully Ram and I never got it. They are also working on our town sewer system so at the beginning of the week we had lots of interruptions to watch the workers cut down our tree in our back yard and lots of trucks, excavators, and other equipment. The boys loved all the excitement. They would run from window to window in our house and there was activity out all the windows. It was a nightmare for me-most of the trucks say "beep beep" when they back up. Once I decided to count how many times I heard "beep beep" in one minute, but I got mixed up between imagining I heard it and actually hearing it because I heard it so often. Plus every time the excavator picked up a load of dirt and dropped it there was a big noise and sometimes it even shook the house. They started at 7am (we usually get up at 8am) and worked with lights until 8pm. We got quite a bit of rain on Wednesday and they continued working through it. Finally on Thursday there was too much water so they quit working. Now we are left with quiet (hooray!) but a big pile of dirt behind our driveway and water standing in the street behind our driveway. I haven't left the house since Thursday so I'm not quite sure what we will have to deal with when we do leave. Because they were sick and they couldn't go outside and once the activity outside quieted down, we accomplished a lot of school. They felt well enough for our babysitter to come on Friday so we didn't do any school then. But we did school all the rest of the days and had complete school days doing all the subjects then too. Ram went to St. Cloud on Saturday but we stayed home and did school. Here's what we did accomplish:
Math: Finished MUS lesson 3.
Handwriting: Lamb 1 practiced writing October. We have lots to do in handwriting with him!
Phonics: We did quite a bit of phonics this week. We are finally off to a good start. We reviewed vowels, did the consonants b,c,d,f,g.
Religion: Memorized Philippians 4:6 and 1 Kings 18:39(for Sunday School), worked on memorizing the second and third commandments and the hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God, Did the Bible stories of Noah, God calls Abram, and Abram rescues Lot.
Science: We read several science books on fall topics like leaves and pumpkins.
Reading: We did quite a bit of reading aloud this week. Finished Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. Continued How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. Read a few stories from My Book House and a few poems, recited Whole Duty of Children by R.L. Stevenson daily.
Latin: Worked on Lesson 2 and 3 from Prima Latina. Lamb 2 is getting really good at answering questions about Latin vocabulary words we have studied. This bugs Lamb 1 so he is paying more attention in Latin. I now know competition is really working to motivate our boy Lambs!
Art: Painted trees with the babysitter as recommended by Five in a Row with the story Mike Mulligan. Did other painting and got paint in our hair too!
Lamb 1 has been asking about having music in our curriculum. I guess I need to get organized and at least do some music appreciation with them.
Tea Time: My friend Heather said that they have tea time daily. I thought this was a brilliant idea and I don't know why I never thought of it before. It sounds so much better than saying snack time! So this week we added tea time into our schedule. I had the Lambs look at some of their children's cookbooks to come up with tea time snacks for a few days. One day we had ants on a log and one day we had moose lips (apples, peanut butter, and mini marshmallows) from this. Every day we had tea (Ram's mom loves tea and has given us a lot. One year we were in the tea of the month club. When they traveled to India they went to a tea plantation and gave us lots of tea from there.). One day we had peanut butter crackers and one day we had apple pie. I found that after tea time is a great time to do Latin and Bible story. We are all gathered together and it's a great time to finish up the few little things we didn't accomplish before lunch. After tea time (and finishing school) they are free to play until supper. We have all started to look forward to tea time. Ram was here for tea time some days and some days we did it by ourselves. It reminded Ram of having tea time while he was at Westfield House at Cambridge University in England. I like it because I have my together time with Ram before bed and now I have time with my boys in the afternoon too.

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