Trucking Along...

Yet another week has flown by! We started out the week with a lot of celebration, since The Girl turned ten. We went roller skating on Sunday, then on Monday, her actual birthday, we went to the movies, and saw Wreck-It Ralph, which we all enjoyed.

As for homeschooling, it was a book heavy week! From our Afternoon Basket:

The kids are really enjoying The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt - we read chapter one this week, all about the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, and Napoleon's time in Egypt. That was great because in reading The Red Pyramid (our current bedtime book), one of the first things mentioned in chapter 2 is the Rosetta Stone, and the kids were able to instantly make that connection! Another book we really enjoyed this week was There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story. We read this as a follow-up to last week's dissection, and loved that it used all the terms for worm parts that we had just learned about from the dissection. Plus Gary Larson just has an awesome sense of humor!

Math

The Girl is really enjoying Math Mammoth's multiplication book. She will easily do 3-4 pages at a time. I think she'll be using more of the Blue Series over the next couple of years, unless (somewhat unlikely) she switches over to Teaching Textbooks.

The Boy is doing quite well with Saxon 6/5. He does every problem without complaint, and makes very few errors at this point. He does want to use Teaching Textbooks again next year, and should be able to go right into level 7 without trouble, I think.

Language Arts

The Girl is a bit frustrated with Explode the Code right now. She feels it is too easy, but since she still is really working on building reading skills, I'd like her to continue with it. Maybe I should just buy the next book up? She is making good progress with Reading Pathways, and next week we're going to try out The Elson Readers.

The Boy is making good progress through The Paragraph Book. He'll be done with it in probably another 5-6 weeks, and then we'll possibly move on to something like The Five Paragraph Essay. I also ordered Writing Strands 3 for him, to give him some more creative, yet structured, writing instruction. I'll have to see how this all works out! He still loves his spelling book, which we will not finish by the end of the "school" year. That's okay, we'll just pick it up again in the fall!

Science

This week was a little lighter on science. We did read chapter one in Real Science 4 Kids Biology, about classification. They watched a Bill Nye video on evolution. Our caterpillars are growing rapidly, and we're waiting anxiously for the mantises to hatch! The ladybug larvae too are growing. Of course, reading There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story was good science too!

History

We read from The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt as mentioned above, and starting watching Out of Egypt, which is really fascinating! We also learned a lot about Alexander Graham Bell, the battle of the Alamo, Dr. Seuss, and Montezuma (all books listed in A Picture Perfect Childhood). We have a plan to make cartouches next week, as per the recommendations in one of the craft books I picked up at the library. I also would like the kids to make a model of the Nile River delta, complete with mini-pyramids. I'll have to see though if that is something they really want to do!

Other

The Boy very much enjoyed his first fencing class at a new level last week (Saturday mornings). We're enjoying listening to The Titan's Curse in the car. Oh, and speaking of Greek mythology, The Boy completed the National Mythology Exam this week, and we mailed it off. Both the kids enjoyed watching Prince of Persia and The Phantom Menace as this week's movies.

We didn't start The Secret Garden yet, so we'll aim to start it next week. We weren't quite as consistent as I would like this week, so there is room for improvement there!

And that's our week. Nothing terribly exciting, but still a decent one! Hope you all had a good week too!