I love old books... and a weekly report....

M and I decided the kids should just do a year of nature study next year, the kind where we go out with pencils and sketch books in hand, then come home to learn more about what we saw and drew. Very Charlotte-Mason-y. Anyhow, I was browsing Living Books Curriculum and saw a book called The Fairyland of Science (which immediately made me think of my Fairy), went to Amazon to look it up, and promptly found a whole bunch of nature-based story books put out by Yesterday's Classics....
The Storybook of Science
Among the Pond People
Among the Forest People
Among the Night People
Among the Farmyard People
Among the Meadow People

I think these might be fun supplementary reading for nature studies! We also have a bunch of gorgeous guides by the (now defunct) Nature Company. And a few books on nature-based projects/experiments. I am also eying this nature portfolio, and some coloring books from Dover Publications.

As for a weekly report, we haven't done much due to illness in our home this week. We are now all on antibiotics, so we should be ready to roll by next week!

Language Arts
Reviewed some of Phonics Pathways with Fairy, who aslo worked on Dick & Jane stories, and Bob Books. Her handwriting is coming along nicely. She still writes many letters from the bottom up, but as long as she is comfortable writing that way and it is legible, I don't see this as a huge issue. I'm reading Ramona the Brave to her, which she loves!

Elf started cursive writing this week, which he thinks is "cool". He also did some work in G.U.M., and is reading the second book in the Dairy of a Wimpy Kid series, in addition to his assigned reading in The Magician's Boy. I tried doing more narration with him this week versus writing, and it went really smoothly. For example, in GU.M., he had to change sentences into questions, and vice versa. Instead of dragging it out by having him write (yes, he is a very reluctant writer), he told me what the answer should be and I wrote it down for him. Charlotte Mason apparently advocated leaving the physical act of really writing (besides copywork) until around the age of 10. Maybe she had a point!

Math
We are continuing to work orally on multiplication tables. Elf also did some arrays, and Fairy worked on a couple of pages of number families 1-4.

History
We read about Romulus and Remus in SOTW, and then in Roman Myths. Both kids colored map pages from the SOTW activity book. We watched a documentary too, called Where Did It Come From? Ancient Rome - the Rise of Apartments, which covered not only apartments, but the Roman water system, how they dry-cleaned their linens (eeeewww, it was aged urine), earthquakes, the first fire department, and more.

Science
We learned a lot about ear canals, etc., this week by visiting the doctor! So, since we've got a start on it, we're skipping ahead in Elementary Life Science to the units on the human body. Elf and Fairy also spent a LOT of time this week playing around with interactive natural disaster stuff on the National Geographic website.

Art
My mom kept the kids one morning to do arts and crafts. They made bubble paintings (in which they ended up more colorful than the paper), clothes-pin magnets decorated with sea shells, beads, and tiny fake flowers..

Other
We read another couple of chapters in Despereaux, and listened to another couple of chapters of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The kids learned how to make semi-poached eggs (not technically poached, but close enough, and very yummy), and they helped me make dinner a couple of times.

Looking back at it, while we didn't do a lot of sit-down lessons, we did seem to do quite a bit of learning!