Wrapping Up Week 13 (2014-15)

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Deanna

The emotional and physical toll of my miscarriage affected our whole week, especially when it came to school. We limped through and did manage to do something every day, but never even touched on our Bible lessons outside of family devotions in the evening. (What? Whatever happened to Bible first? What sort of priorities does that show? Believe me, I needed a lot of grace for myself.) The week flew by quickly, however, and here’s what we did.

Math

Math is the one subject I tend to stress about getting behind in, mostly because we started Year 2 of the Mathematics Enhancement Programme a few weeks after all our other subjects for first grade. Last year I had taken some time off from Year 1 when Ian was struggling, which meant we ended working on it all the way through our summer break and then into the first few weeks of this year. I’d really like to finish up Year 2 when we finish the rest of our school year, but that means we don’t have a lot of wiggle room.

This week Ian got through lessons 46-50. As I’ve said in the past few weeks, he’s starting to get frustrated by some of the concepts we’re working on, primarily adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers. To help him visualize the numbers he’s working with I tried having him use math blocks this week. It was really helpful for adding 10’s and 1’s, and I think we’ll keep using these until he’s better able to keep the place values straight in his mind.

Literature/Ambleside Online

We started term two of Ambleside Online, Year 1, which meant new poetry selections. This term we’re reading the poems of A. A. Milne. We started through When We Were Very Young this week, and if we have time in the next few months we’ll move onto Now We Are Six. (If we don’t get through both books during this term, I think I’ll save it for summertime because I don’t want to rush through these delightful poems.) I’ve owned copies of these books since my childhood, but I’ve only ever read a few scattered poems over the years. I really enjoyed getting into them this week, and they’re especially fun for my boys because the poems occasionally mention Christopher Robin.

History Cycle

This week for our study of ancient Greece we continued to read through Our Little Athenian Cousin of Long Ago by Julia Darrow Cowles. One day while I read, Ian worked through the drawing instructions for the Parthenon from Draw and Write Through History: Greece and Rome and added that to his history notebook.

Science

We finished up The World of Animals this week, reading about microscopic creatures like protists and bacteria, (which aren’t really considered animals, but neither are they plants, so this was as good a time as any to talk about them). It was a great week for getting out our microscope to look at both prepared slides and homemade ones with water from the stream at our local park.

Ian made a picture of a paramecium for his science notebook (although my fuzzy brain couldn’t remember where I had put my yarn, so he just drew the cilia rather than cutting little pieces of yarn as the book suggested).

Extras

This was our last week reviewing Middlebury Interactive Languages (Spanish K-2), so Ian completed a few more lessons. He has really enjoyed this program, so I intend to finish the rest of the units in the semester he’s working on before we go back to our Salsa lessons for Spanish.

We took school pictures one morning this week, and since that spoiled our regular schedule for the day I decided to take the kids to our local Children’s Museum. They’ve been begging to go back, and everyone enjoyed the current exhibit on space (as well as all our other favorite permanent exhibits).