Weekly Report... 4/30-5/4...

A week of homeschooling ups and downs admittedly.

Monday

I had to work late for the once a month official equipment meeting (I work for an adaptive technology center), so we focused just on reading and math. We started our geometry studies with some Math Mammoth... The Girl worked on counting vertices and sides, and drawing geometric shapes, while The Boy learned about angles, rays, lines, and line segments. At the bottom of his math page was a little note from the author, saying that students may wish to keep a geometry notebook with definitions, examples, etc. Had I suggested this, I think The Boy may have thought it sounded good, but it wouldn't have gone anywhere. Reading it as a suggestion from someone else on the other hand... well, let's just say one of his homemade notebooks has a bunch of terms and sketches already! He also worked on spelling, and The Girl worked on reading--we got Reading Pathways this week, so I am adding a page of that each day to her reading regimen. We finished up at bedtime with another chapter of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Tuesday 

 Let's pretend Tuesday didn't exist. I spent my entire afternoon helping someone run errands. We read at bedtime, but that was it. I do think they watched some animal shows at my mom's house, so I'll call that science. And we did work in a few Mother Goose rhymes, in honor of Mother Goose Day... some from memory, some from an old book.

Wednesday

We planted our garden. 

We talked about the garden club the kids used to be in when we went to the charter school, the only class they really miss. So now we have our own garden club! We also talked about all the care our vegetables would need, and how helpful this garden will be in keeping us well fed. We talked about preserving foods, something we plan to try. And we all reminisced about the flavor of sun-warmed cherry tomatoes... mmmm...

We did a little math (more geometry), worked on spelling and reading, watched a documentary on wild animals, and an episode of How It's Made. We read a chapter in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza...

We read this in place of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, partly in preparation for Thursday, and partly because I have put my Kindle in a Safe Place. And when I put things in a Safe Place, they are not always easy to find.

ETA: I found it later the same evening, in the mail basket. I'm not sure why I thought of that as a Safe Place, but there you have it! And, in my own defense, it was safe and sound.

 Thursday

We spent our morning at the War Memorial Opera House with members of the San Francisco Ballet, watching...

Yes, a ballet of Don Quixote! Naturally, it deviates from the original story line, but we still very much enjoyed it. Being a "school show' or "community matinee", it was not the complete ballet, but still a decent length, and very good! We liked the sets, which they explained, and allowed the audience to see being transformed between acts. I honestly never realized that when major ballet companies travel, they take their own floor with them! The dancing was, as always, exquisite, and Cassia in particular loved the costuming.

Besides all that excitement, it is more of the regular stuff. For math, we did some more work from Math Mammoth, and then played around with tangrams.

 In spelling, The Boy wrote sentences using his spelling words, and The Girl went through another two pages of Phonics Pathways and a page in Reading Pathways. They watched two more episodes of How It's Made, learning about everything from canoe construction, to goldsmithing. Bedtime included more of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and some of Emily Dickinson's poetry. The kids' favorite chapter in Don Quixote so far is the one about tilting at windmills!

Friday

Park Day took up much of our afternoon, as usual on a Friday. The Girl did two pages each in Phonics Pathways and Reading Pathways when we got home, and The Boy finished his spelling work. I managed to squeeze in one chapter from Life of Fred: Apples. I found my Kindle at last, so we can enjoy some Wonderful Wizard of Oz later this evening, in addition to a little more Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and their crazy adventures.

 Other

As for me, I re-read much of Family Feasts for $75 a Week. I am thinking I should probably just buy this book second-hand rather than getting it from the library repeatedly. I am also reading a little of The Complete Tightwad Gazette each day. Little by little, my penny-pinching frugal ways are benefiting us--we paid off two more small debts, and so have more money to put toward other debts. I sold a bunch of homeschooling materials I was no longer using, and bought the kids their summer footwear--an absolute necessity since The Girl had suddenly gone up two shoe sizes, and The Boy went up three. He's only 5 inches shorter than me now, at not quite eleven.

I've been planning out menus two weeks at a time, and doing all the shopping in one big trip, though I do stop by the store to buy fresh fruits and veggies on a regular basis. My menu plans are loose, meaning that while I have 14 dinners planned, what nights I serve them on varies according to my mood, and how much time I have available.

This weekend we're doing a major purging. A while ago, we had a plumbing issue in the garage (where the washer and dryer are kept) which resulted in a flood of minor proportions, which resulted in damage to quite a lot of stored items. Our city offers a once-yearly free dumpster, one of the smaller ones, so we are taking advantage of that this weekend. I am also planning on taking a lot of outgrown (and undergrown in my case) clothes to the handy drop box three blocks from here. Homeschooling materials will be sorted as well, because there is a homeschool association party coming up, with a table for free and cheap curriculum. I'm donating everything I haven't been able to sell, or won't be able to sell.

Luxury reading this week: Gentian Hill (yes again, I love this book!), and A Circle of Quiet.

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Hope you all had a good week!