A quick Weekly Report... 9/26-9/30...

This has been an interesting week. We did get a good amount of work done, plus we are facing a big change in the way things work around here!

Language Arts
Cyrus began keeping his journal again this week, at long last. He read a lot, from several books-- The Sign of the Beaver, a couple from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and The Magician's Nephew; he worked in Intermediate Language Lessons, reading and analyzing poetry; and he asked me all week for spelling tips. I bought a Spectrum Spelling workbook for him to try out starting next week.

Cassia worked through 2 full lessons from Easy Lessons for Teaching Word Families. I wrote them on a white-board, using a different color of pen for the word family and beginning parts, so she could see the word family and not try to sound it out each time. She did "ap", "an", "at", and "ash" (on "ash" I also underlined the "sh" so she would remember that it was only one sound). This approach worked really, really well, and she read all four word lists with very little trouble! She also re-read a little from Hop on Pop. We're going to start using Explode the Code again on Monday. We'll also review the word families we covered (and do a few more), which I am going to have her copy down in a folded-paper booklet I made just for that purpose.

We read more in Tatterhood & Other Tales - I highly recommend this book! And we read a bit more of The Wind in the Willows.

Math
Still traveling through math with Teaching Textbooks. It did get a little more challenging this week for Cyrus, who learned about estimating, though he still scored 95-100% on each lesson. Cassia's hasn't gotten too much more challenging yet... she's working on the idea of a number plus itself, plus one more, or the whole thing as a subtraction problem. I have noticed that in the problem sets, TT seems to be more of a spiral approach than mastery, which I really think is beneficial, as it builds in constant review. We also reviewed unit prices at the grocery store, and fractions while cooking. many of Cassia's word problems have to do with cooking, which is rapidly becoming one of her favorite hobbies. I love it when the kids can see that math applies to real life!

History
Cyrus read more in The Sign of the Beaver, which has led to all kinds of interest in herbalism, Native Americans, and survival skills. Cassia and I finished All of a Kind Family and started All of a Kind Family Downtown. She's fascinated by Jewish history now, and turn-of-the-century city life.

We watched a video on Columbus this week, from Schlessinger Films, and read the first two chapters in A First Book in American History. The kids loved the tone of the book, as did I, and they loved the little black-and-white illustrations on each page. We also discussed civil rights and Rosa Parks, after a discussion on Halloween costumes (Cassia wants to be a southern belle, and so we were talking about plantations and slavery, hence the civics discussion).

Science
We started our birding project with 4H today. We made sock feeders, and smeared a peanut butter mixture on pinecones. We learned about several common species of local birds, proper feeding setups and care, migration, etc. I am waiting for The Burgess Bird Book for Children to arrive in the mail - Cassia will like it even if Cyrus doesn't - and this weekend we are hoping to set up a bird station with feeders, the birdbath, and so forth. We plan to hang a pair of binoculars by the backdoor as well. And we dug out our copy of the Peterson First Guide to North American Birds.

Other
Cyrus decided to work his way through The Everything Book of Drawing, and he's been working more on computer animation. Cassia has been adding birds and bugs to her nature journal at all hours of the day and helping cook nearly every meal.

And the big news...
I am leaving my grocery store job, effective as of two weeks from now, one of which is an already-approved vacation week! In fact, I gave notice (written) last night. Why? Because, after two interviews and a lot of nail biting, I landed a part-time secretarial job at the local Office of Education! I'll be working regular, morning hours five days a week. The pay is a tiny bit higher too. This will make it easier for me to schedule other activities, for M to schedule his work hours since he'll no longer have to rush home to take over the kids so I can dash off to another late evening at work... I'll be home to cook dinners, and read bedtime stories more than twice a week. My mom has offered to care for the kids in the mornings, and we do better with homeschooling in the afternoons anyhow. I'll probably be starting in a week and a half, after our fun family vacation.

Next week, I only have three days of schooling planned, due to the aforementioned vacation weekend. I won't be posting a weekly report either, you'll just have to wait for all the vacation photos!

Guess that wasn't that "quick" of a weekly report either!