Weekly wrap-up

This has been a fun week for us here.  We've had the added job of taking care of Tinkerbell as she recovered from her vet visit, went out to play with some new friends, and did our normal lessons.  However, I am going to mainly talk about the academics.

This week we wrapped up our visit to Australia in history.  Jojo had fun and we decided to dig into it pretty well, taking a few weeks to learn about the animals, plants, and culture in general.  We wrapped up Australia by making a shadowbox of Australian ocean life using a few household supplies we had on hand and some creativity.  It is nothing spectacular, as we are out of scotch tape so I had to be creative in how we attached some pieces (particularly the "floating" ones, I used a safety pin to attach the yarn to the animals and then punched holes in the box and tied the string that way instead of a couple pieces of tape holding it all on) but she had a good time.

Ignore the face she's making, she has hit THAT stage. *sigh*  As you can see, it isn't fancy at all and you can definitely tell a 5 year old made it with minimal help from mommy.

In math, she FINISHED her math K materials and we are now waiting for approval, ordering, and delivery of 1st grade math.  It should be all taken care of in the next 2 weeks I'm guessing, so until then she and I will work together in a Spectrum math workbook that was given to us by a friend and I shall introduce her to my friends also known as the addition and subtraction flash cards.

She is resisting phonics and language arts still, but we are making progress there.  She did 2 units in language arts this week after I discovered that she will listen to stories and poetry if I sit down and start reading it to her little brother.  She's done that whole "no I am NOT listening to you read" pout when I say that I'm going to read, and then when I tell her fine I'll read to Bub then sit with him on the floor and read her school stories to him she'll slowly make her way over and be next to me looking at the pictures and listening (and interrupting with commentary about the story and questions as needed) by the end of the second paragraph I'm reading out loud.  So I'm taking advantage of this discovery and working at an accelerated pace through the material to "catch up" in the curriculum (not hard to do, the material has us doing a story for 3 days straight and covers skills that she's already familiar with so I have no issues condensing the work to a story or 2 each day).  She's making excellent progress in her penmanship as well, and I anticipate that she'll finish her workbook by the new year and move on to just working on copying words and sentences daily.

Health right now is being covered by involving her in caring for her brother, cooking, and taking care of the dog.  She really likes this, and is easily doing daily health lessons through this method.

She also has finally figured out how to pedal her bike that she got for her birthday last month, which you already know I'm logging for physical education.  She also is starting yoga and stretching every morning to start the day.

That my dear friends is what our week has looked like here.  We've had a LOT of fun and learned a lot of things.  I didn't think she'd do this well in schoolwork, but she's pulling it off nicely.