Nice rainy week...

Here's our week's round-up. It was kind of a slow-feeling week due to the loads of rain we got, which we sorely needed. Our once-dead lawns are turning green again (mostly)!

Language Arts:
Elf worked through the last part of Lesson 3 and all of Lesson 4 in ETC. He also got 100% on his spelling test (trim, trap, frog, trot, rip, press, and clam). Of course much of this involved moaning and groaning. He loves the ETC workbook, except that he's not very fond of all the writing! Funny, because he's really enjoying his journal. This week he wrote a little about our house, and drew a picture of it. Fairy drew a picture too, and I'll tell you, our house looks very different from one picture to the next! Elf also finally read aloud a Level 1 book - #11: Snip Snap - that he's been avoiding because he thought it looked too hard - surprise! He read the whole thing quite well, if a little slowly, which I'd actually rather he do than rush through and make up words. In addition, he flew through a few more pages in his HWOT workbook.

Fairy is finishing up with the letter m in her Get Ready for the Code, and spends a fair amount of time going through her alphabet flash cards, singing the alphabet or naming the items on the cards with a lot of emphasis on the beginning sound. She's enjoying her HWOT book as well, and is asking for a journal.

Math:
We're up through lesson 32 in Saxon Math 2. Elf has learned this week about temperatures to the nearest 10 degrees, doubles plus one, a review of addition & subtraction word problems and some patterning, plus I tried him out on simple double digit addition involving carrying numbers, and he got it right off the bat! We'll see how well he remembers it later on though.

Fairy has been (mostly) completing worksheets that I print off Enchanted Learning or LearningPage dot com, as well as keeping her Meeting Book up to date. We go over the days of the week every morning with the Meeting Book, and she's looking forward to a new color pattern next month (this month is brown and orange).

History:
We read chapter 4 in SOTW this week, and browsed through a few books on ancient Egypt from the charter school. I've "chickened" out (sorry, couldn't resist) and decided we're going to mummify apples instead. By the way, Jenny, how are your game hens doing? We're thinking we might make it to the Egyptian Museum sometime in November - we'll see. Both kids are really enjoying the Egyptians, so I am happy we went with chronological history. We also did some map work and coloring pages this week, and I need to do a search on my tv for related shows (the History Channel usually has some good ones).

Science:
Elf has been studying owls at his charter school and is fascinated by them, so we've been talking about them a lot, drawing pictures, looking at all the cool little bones he got out of the owl pellet he dissected at the charter school... we also read, cover to cover, the Zoobook that arrived on Tuesday - all about sharks. He says he wants to continue studying animals for a while, and in another month or so we may move into anatomy (animal and human). Maybe a trip to the zoo is in order too!

Fairy on the other hand is very interested lately in both snakes (due to Blackberry) and bunnies. There are several of the regular pet-type bunnies loose in our neighborhood, so she runs to the livingroom window every morning to look for them.

Home Ec:
The kids helped me make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies this week - I had them measure and add the ingredients while I supervised. Only problem was, it was hard to keep the raw ingredients in the bowl rather than their mouths! They also helped me clean the house as we were expecting company today - first time my dad has been here to see the house. Elf is getting really good about trying to keep the room he shares with Fairy nice and tidy. Still a ways to go, but he's learning! I've given both of them a few chores to do daily, and they're doing well with them. M and I have decided that the time has come to officially start an allowance for them, provided they do their chores, and their homeschooling.

Other:
Elf has gotten through the boring intro in Maps, Globes, Graphs and is now working on chapter 1, which is all about landscape features, like mountains, rivers, plains, etc.

Art-wise, they're both drawing between 1-10 pictures a day, so I haven't been worrying about that, although there are a couple of drawing projects on KinderArt that I'd like to do with them.

Musically, we've been listening to variety of music these days. E likes jazz, so we hear a fair bit of that, and today we watched Fantasia 2000 - art and music!

Speaking of movies, Fairy wants to be Snow White for Halloween, but had never seen the movie. It turned out my dad had an old VHS copy he didn't want anymore, so he brought it over today when he came for lunch, and we finished it a couple of hours ago. Parts of it freaked both kids out, but they laughed almost hysterically through a lot of it. Elf is going to be Optimus Prime. We still need to make it to the local pumpkin patch! There was a homeschool association field trip on Friday to one, but since it rained, I don't know if it happened or not.

I called the good grocery store this week to see what was going on, and I'll be going in for a second interview within a week. Yaaay! I aslo got another perfect score on an essay for my Political Science class, which is just funny because I still don't own the textbook (don't tell my teacher that). I base everything I write for those off his recorded lectures (it's an online class), stuff I've read or seen, and what I can find on the internet or in the encyclopedia.

And that's it for now!