Books & Bubbles...

Another weekly report at last! And a good week it was, overall. There are some areas I want to continue working on improving, and I have a couple of ideas to keep things going well.

Cassia's Nature Art

 We, as always, did a lot  of reading this week. Here's a small sampling of books we read...

We also read about Mozart and his sister (incredible artwork in this one, by the way); Franklin Roosevelt; and the Super Bowl. Oh, and Groundhog Day, Gilgamesh, and some reading just for fun. The Girl and I are about halfway through Dancing Shoes, and as a bedtime story, we're still reading The Magician's Elephant. The Boy spent all week bouncing back and forth between The Mark of Athena and The Bad Beginning, as well as Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction.

While we are very much enjoying Life of Fred, I do worry that The Boy especially will lose track of some of the ideas in the books, so I think I am going to have him start keeping a math journal type of thing. A simple composition book, where he can write down mathematical terms, definitions, and so forth. Other than that, all is well in math-land. The Boy worked on borrowing, sets, unions of sets, and more, while The Girl worked on telling time, addition and subtraction facts, and geometry this week.

And here's where I admit I had a moment of panic this week - is Life of Fred really enough? I started hunting out copies of Saxon Math books... truthfully, I still have a [used] copy of Saxon 6/5 in my Amazon cart for The Boy. The author of LOF says it is enough, so I am trying to believe that, to breathe, and to relax about this, before I hit the buy button on Amazon.

The Girl has been using primarily Explode the Code and Beyond the Code for the last couple of weeks, with some Now I'm Reading and Frog & Toad books thrown in. However, while she is making progress, it has definitely slowed down a little. I've decided to bring back in Reading Pathways. While she does not love this program, it works. I did give her a test on phoenomic awareness over at Reading Horizons, and I am super pleased to announce she scored 84 out of 84!!!

The Boy is still working with Soaring with Spelling, and Word Roots, but I am not overly thrilled with his spelling progress. My sister has offered to lend me her copy of Words Their Way (she's a teacher), which she says is an excellent tool. I may try it with both kids!

Science was so much fun this week (in fact, the kids are continuing their bubble explorations outside as I type this)! We worked through two projects in Bubble-Ology... one involving the Bernoulli effect (or keeping a bubble afloat by waving your hand, a piece of paper, or a card above the bubble), and one in predicting when a bubble will pop.

We also had a lot of fun with art. I highly recommend the book Using Color in Your Art - we discussed primary colors this week, and did a hands-on project (The Boy's is still a work in progress, so I'll share it later). Here is The Girl's piece...

And mine. I had a lot of fun - it's been too long since I've done any art!

Let's see, what else did we do? Watched Diary of a Wimpy Kid 3, and How to Eat Fried Worms. Watched some Top Chef re-runs (season 2). The kids played a lot of a game that combines frisbee tossing with foam weaponry and a football! They've done most of their chores this week. I finished reading Coriolanus, and plan to watch the movie tomorrow. I think we're doing Hamlet next. I'm really enjoying this class! I got in touch with the professor I read/grade papers for, and she's got a colleague that wants to hire me as well!

I'm feeling really organized at the moment because I've got all of our books for the next couple of weeks either on hand, or coming in on hold at the library. We'll be finishing up our trip through ancient Sumer this week, I think, and then we'll spend some time in ancient Egypt. I'd like to finish that part off with a trip here. We went once, back in 2008, but I think we'd love to go again!

Hope your upcoming week is a good one!