Weekly Report... Storm Chasers & Crafts...

Overall I would say it was a pretty good week! We got some quality work done, cleaned the family room, and generally enjoyed things.

The Boy, deeply involved in National Geographic

 The Boy started his week by devouring the cover story from the latest issue of National Geographic. He has long been a fan of the Storm Chasers TV show, and was horrified by the death of one earlier this year, so when he saw the cover of NG, he grabbed it right away. By the way, the National Geographic magazine is a great teaching tool for older kids!

In writing this week, he worked on a couple of things: a descriptive paragraph (about his pinhole camera model) from Write With the Best (this also had a pre-writing assignment connected with it); and some creative dialog for animations on his computer. He also cranked out a couple of lessons in Life of Fred, in which he showed me that he finally has mastered the idea of division. I have found that both kids love checking their own answers in the Fred books, so I think from here on out I will let them check it themselves. If they come across something they did wrong, I can help them go through it then.

The Boy also built a telescope from his Milestones in Science kit this week, and it was... well, okay. It is a cardboard model, so we weren't really expecting a lot from it. Makes me wonder though if there is a kit for a real telescope that he could put together, nothing too fancy. And there was a fair amount of art, both on paper and the computer. Plus a few Top Gear and Mythbusters episodes, and several more chapters of Quozl.

The Girl, working hard on a hot glue project

The Girl has been quite busy crafting this week with her hot glue gun, craft sticks, matboard, and an old bead set. She built a little fairy house along with various other items. She also worked with clay again this week, making funny little sculptures of people and animals.

She did two lessons from Serl's Language Lessons this week (you can read more about that here), which we have decide to set aside. Life of Fred was a blast for her this week -- she worked on missing factors, identifying parts of a matrix, addition, and subtraction. We read a few more chapters of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, and she watched an episode of Wild Africa, alongside a couple of episodes of Blue Planet. We may start reading All About Dinosaurs again (we only ever read the first chapter), and she wants to do a frog dissection soon.

She read out loud to me each day, and her fluency is really improving. I'm using Reading Pathways again with her at the moment to practice this skill, and I must say it is a fantastic resource for fluency!

And she sprained her wrist, so she will not be skating in this weekend's roller derby bout. We aren't sure about the derby sleepover either. I need to email her coaches and ask if she can still attend that.

Family Learning

We started, finally, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow this week. What a great book! I was a little nervous at first that some of the (archaic) language might be a bit much, but there have been no complaints. We also started the third Harry Potter book this week. This week's poem was Poe's The Raven, and so the kids have been going around saying "Nevermore" quite a lot. We listened to three more chapters in Story of the World, all about the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians. We read some of Dr. Art's Guide to Science, then decided we'd really rather be reading The Magic of Reality right now. We read about St. Bernard dogs and the monastery they are named for in The Complete Book of Marvels, which included a little reading about Hannibal and his crossing of the Alps on elephants, as the author of the Complete Book..., Richard Halliburton, did the same thing!

Tonight's movie... The Corpse Bride!

Weekend Agenda

M will be out fishing all day tomorrow, so the kids and I will have the house to ourselves. The Boy has fencing practice; The Girl may or may not be doing a derby sleepover; I need to stop at the library for holds; I have some more cleaning I want to do; and I have papers to grade. I'd like to fit in another Halloween-related movie or two, and plan out next week's writing for the kids, a la Brave Writer (mostly).

Any plans for the weekend?