Last Weekly Report for a While

School is dwindling down at our house. Sky's last day was Friday. Film Buff has to continue with math with Dad, and I'm going thru 50 Great Short Stories with him for the rest of the summer (except the 4 weeks we will be off on vacation). Nature Girl has been fooling around with Saxon 5/4--a dear friend who is moving to Okinawa gave it to us, and I casually showed it to her. After 3 weeks with no math, she was intrigued, and we've done the first 4 lessons this week, mostly orally. But we are not going to do much more--it will start to get too hard.

We are continuing with Apologia's Zoology 3. I don't like the heavy-handed Creationist perspective, but I can overlook most of it. Not that I don't think Creationism isn't valid--far from it--but I'm not sure I agree 100% with the way it is presented in this book. It is, however, full of interesting facts, engaging in tone, and beautifully illustrated--it "feels nice" to read. Did you know rabbits have their sweat glands in their lips?

Gotta go--several meetings and appointments this week. We need to figure out what to do with Sky. We need to get Film Buff's registration process completed for Community College, and we need to prepare for our parish retreat. Lots to do!

Almost Done With School! June 2-June6

Just a quick update on school work-
Nature Girl is nearly done, so this week was very light. I gave her some phonics and math pages almost every day. I wish I had kept up with Adventures in Phonics C--there's such good info in that little workbook! I did think it important for us to go over the rules of dividing syllables (and I learned a lot in the process), so I assigned a few pages for independent work. We were off to the dentist on Tues with Film Buff, and yesterday I was here:
so I gave NG small packets to work on in my absence. I must say, she a "git 'er done" kinda gal!

We did the chapters on Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, in SOTW. The Royal Tudors--what a fun bunch! Nature Girl thinks the name is funny...a little base humor. We followed some of the recommendations for extra literature and non-fiction from the Activity Guide. Talk about a valuable resource--truly, a top find for the year. NG did lots of map work, these narration/copywork pages, and we did this extra reading. Love Love Love the Bruce Colville Shakespeare adaptations! Illustrations (particularly in Midsummer...) are outstanding, and he weaves the original language into the retold stories effectively. In fact, Film Buff will be studying Hamlet and Midsummer next fall, so I picked up our Barron's plays to prepare, and was pleasantly surprised that quite a few of the original phrases showed up in the picture books. Now I know the plots, too--which was my goal for Nature Girl, so that Shakespeare won't be so intimidating when she gets to the real stuff. I asked her what she thought of his stories, right after we had finished Hamlet--she was quite impressed, and thought he was a great storyteller!
We are on our last timeline page. We just need to cover Sir Walter Raleigh and the Lost Colony, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Nature Girl is reading Elizabeth I from the Royal Diaries series--much better than the one I bought on Eleanor of Aquitaine (never did get to it). We are going to continue history until we finish, even if it's into July.
Apologia's Land Animals of the Sixth Day arrived in the mail this week, and Nature Girl couldn't wait to start. I know, it's weird to start a new science program when school is almost out, but we did such a little science this year, and this looked so good when I was surfing the web--she said she'd really like to do it, so what the heck. It will give us something to do on those long summer days (of which there will be too few, of course). The first experiment involved creating a "habitat for M&M's" out of 3 colors of contruction paper, torn into pieces and crumpled up. She had one minute (changed from the 2 minutes in the experiment as written) to hunt for as many as she could find. We should have used the smaller candies, or Skittles--the Peanut M&M's we used were quite easy to find. Anyway, she learned a little and we had a good time. The idea was that the candies of the same color as the paper would be harder to find--like well-camouflaged prey.
She made a chart, and filled in her first "lab report." She also made me take a picture of her eating an M&M and called it "M&M's in their natural habitat," which I thought was pretty clever! I don't post pics of her face, so that's just for her notebook!
The text comes from a 6 Day Creation viewpoint--I'm not there, but I want to give her several perspectives. It was like a mini-Bible study, too--and we both really enjoyed that aspect.
Sky took this picture of a lovely rainbow created by the sprinklers in the backyard. We has so much rain right after this--huge, tornado-filled thunderstorms that knocked out the power for a few minutes, brought down several trees and many branches, but did no other real damage.

Couple of happies--Film Buff got his driver's license!! Yea!! I know he's proud. Ibaked him a cake and Nature Girl and I decorated it with little cars from the dollar store. We will be traveling to see my sil and nieces in OH this weekend, but he will not be driving there! Not yet. J is graduating from HS--we are so proud of her. I'll get to see my parents, too.

Keep us all in your prayers, esp. Sky.

Hopefully, I'll be able to post more regularly in the future.