Being productive was a little difficult this week, at least at the beginning, due to Sofie's performances in The Nutcracker. She was a mouse, and was in three shows last weekend and two on Tuesday. Oscar's decided that he doesn't want to miss being in the show next year; he was the first of the two to be interested in ballet, actually, until shyness overcame him when he was four. He's over that now, largely in thanks to jujitsu and his wonderful sensei. I'm very glad he realized now that he wants to get back to it, while he still has time to make good headway before reaching the ages of the parts he hopes to play, instead of going back in a few years and being too inexperienced to play the more interesting roles.
In the end, though, we did still manage to do school each day. We won't begin using the winter quarter schedule that I posted this week until the quarter starts in January, so for now we've been taking advantage of my extra time and doing a slightly heavier load, which we also do during the summer break. Instead of doing three long math lessons and two short drilling sessions, we're doing math lessons each day and dropping the drill until I go back to school. We're also doing writing four times a week instead of three.
This week in:
Math: Oscar's covered the beginnings of multiplication, reviewed time, and reviewed adding multiple many-digit numbers. Today, we'll practice subtraction. Sofie's practiced multiples of ten, counting by fives, and using the two-fives strategy for adding numbers whose sum is in the teens. As we approach mental addition of two two-digit numbers, I'm working out a backup plan in case she's just not quite mature enough. We'll still continue as scheduled until/if she has a problem, but if she does need more time before working on that I'm planning to cover some of the later lessons on geometry first.
History: We've finished our tour with the Vikings, having studied the settlements in Iceland and Greenland last week, and the invasions of Britain this week. Last night we also covered the origins of the English language and an overview of feudalism.
Writing: Oscar's done copywork and narrations from The Jungle Book, and of course his "poetry analysis". I'm still delaying Sofie's beginning Writing With Ease until she's most of the way done with the reading curriculum, so she's done her usual copywork from her phonics readers each day and does WWE-style narrations (which are only a sentence at the first-grade level) with the history material.
Spelling: We're still waiting on the delivery of All About Spelling levels two and three for Oscar, but Sofie's done simple short-vowel words in Step 5 of level 1.
Reading: Oscar's reading Merlin: The Lost Years and the fourth book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Sofie's covered all the letter pairs that make the long and short-oo sounds, and today will begin the letter pairs that make the "aw" sound.
Science: I need to ask Richard to get some good picture of the projects they work on in their Lego engineering class.
Logic: They're both nearly done with their current logic books and are waiting on the arrival of the next ones. I'm thinking, though, of possibly switching from classical to mathematical logic for a while, just for a change of pace. It would also be fun for them because I'll be covering some of that in my discrete math class this quarter, and they'd love to be able to recognize the symbols and have a frame of reference for what I'll be doing. I'm looking into Tarski's World; does anyone have experience with that with young kids?
Spanish: Our tutor is on an extended winter break to spend time with her new grandson, and we're taking a break, too.
That's pretty much everything for this week. I've found myself wishing, now that we've been officially homeschooling for over a year, that I'd kept a record like this before so I could look back and recall more precisely how things went. I don't know if I'll actually be able to do this weekly once the next quarter starts, but we'll see.
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