Week 2... Rough Waters...

What a week! My sciatica flared up last Friday, and I was in excruciating pain for the next 3 days. Then I took my father to his dr's appointment on Monday, and one the way home, a hose blew out and the car overheated. Took the tow truck driver (nicest tow truck driver EVER) about 10-15 minutes to get my dad into the seat in the tow truck so we could be hauled 8 miles. Get to the car repair place to find out it is closed on Mondays, so I had to have my mom (they're divorced) come and pick us up. Then I borrowed my mom's van to pick my husband up from college, and while waiting for him (class ran over) dealt with a very nasty screechy woman who accused me of purposefully blocking her driveway (which I didn't), and screamed at me, while honking nonstop from inside her car, that I had better never do it again.

Yep. That was about it. After that, I managed to get home, put food on the table, and collapse. Great start to the week!

As of today though, the sciatica flare-up has almost gone... phew!

On to schooling now, which did not go as I hoped. But, we did hit the basics much of the week.

The Boy

He worked through a few more division lessons in Math Mammoth, and feels ready to head back to Saxon next week, much more confident!

He also enjoyed working with a thesaurus this week in Write With the Best. He likes finding unusual words, so this was a good exercise for him.

And of course, he did a lot of reading! He finished Goliath and started Over Sea, Under Stone. He also worked on a house made from popsicle/craft sticks and hot glue, which he is making for a friend.

The Girl

She was very happy to work on math again this week, and was especially excited by the challenge of adding columns of numbers! She also really enjoys the exercises where she has to find the missing number... good practice for algebra later on.

Her work in Reading Horizons is going well too. This week it was about adding suffixes, so a little review of phonetic families, and some new work on when to double an ending consonant, and when not to.

She helped cook dinner again this week, and made most of a tamale pie by herself! She worked on some cartooning and abstract painting as well.

Both

We listened to another chapter in Story of the World, about ancient Egypt. They are both in love with the way Jim Weiss reads, comparing it favorably to another favorite narrator, Jim Dale. They agree that Jim Weiss is the American equivalent of Jim Dale!

We read The Fantastic Adventures of Krishna, and both kids made a Main Lesson Book entry, though both also said the story was absolutely bizarre.

We read more in our bedtime Harry Potter book, and a little more of The Princess Bride.

And we finally started Latin! We're using Getting Started with Latin, and each kid is keeping track of what we've done in a composition book.

For Next Week

Honestly, I think we're just going to stick with daily basics (math, reading/writing, Latin, a chapter of SOTW) and then interest-led for everything else--we actually get stuff done, and the kids really look forward to learning more about the things that interest them. I picked up a beautifully illustrated (Michael Hague) version of The Story of Dr. Doolittle to start reading with The Girl for her animal studies. And The Boy is going to start reading through The New Way Things Work, as part of his physics and engineering studies. We decided that we'll stick too with our plan of having me "do science" with each of them separately, so The Boy will watch a documentary on Mondays, while The Girl and I study zoology, and then it will reverse on Thursdays. I added a bunch more documentaries to both our Amazon Watchlist and our Netflix Instant Queue, so we'll be ready to go!

I also hope to get back to our rotational readings next week. No more back pain, and no more car trouble, I hope!

Have a great weekend! We have some fun plans which I'll share pictures of next week!