The School Week in Review

We had a snow day Friday, no co-op. It was a wonderful unexpected day at home! We had a productive week in school. In Bible we started reading through the book of Luke. We noted that Mark makes no mention of Jesus' birth but begins with John the Baptist as an adult, and Jesus' baptism. On the other hand, Luke begins with John's birth being foretold, and then Jesus' birth being foretold. They were excited to draw "Bethlehem" pictures! 5 year old C has decided he wants to do his own drawings in his Bible journal now, as opposed to me doing them for him. He is doing very well drawing stick people! We finished Luke chapter 3 and will move on to chapter 4 next week.

Everyone continued in their appropriate level of daily seat work. The older 3 children are doing very well in their Math U See workbooks. 7 year old L got 100% on his math test! 5 year old C learned about the hundreds place value this week. He is also learning how to write the letter "P". Look in the sidebar to find the books that the oldest two are currently reading.

In history we began learning about the northern colonies as a region. We studied each of the 13 colonies in detail during our last unit, but as a lead up to the revolutionary war, we are learning about regional similarities and differences, and how different regions approached the formation of a new government. We learned about the geography and climate of the northern colonies, as well as shipbuilding and fishing, as these were two of the north's main industries. We will be learning a bit about whaling next week, which should be fun!

You may have noticed that I don't talk about science much, and that is because I completely dropped the ball on using our science textbook this year. We have done lots of informal science (reading science related books and talking about things), which is basically what we've been doing all along until this past fall when I thought we needed to formalize it with a textbook. So, my goal is to get back to the textbook this next week and finish up chapter 1 which we started so many months ago! If we don't meet that goal I'm not going to sweat it. Our daughter scored at a 7th grade level on the science portion of the SAT last spring (when she was in 4th grade). I don't say that to brag, but rather to illustrate that what I've read about formal science not being really "required" until middle school has proven true for us! (sorry all you elementary science teachers!).

I am making a change in our children's daily assignment sheets, which list out all the work they need to do each day. I am adding their daily chores to this sheet rather than having a separate chore chart on the fridge. The older 3 children are getting really good at following their daily assignment sheet and crossing off everything as they do it. The two piano players already have practicing as one of their daily assignments, and if I add chores to this page it will hopefully simplify the amount of paper we have to keep track of and look at. So that's one of my jobs for this weekend.

I'm looking forward to next week!