Saturday, May 28, 2011

Weekly Wrap-Up

 Week 2 with our new schedule. So far so good. We've hit a couple snags but nothing that can't be fixed.

Monday - We started a new book today, Fact or Opinion, Cause and Effect. The first section has to do with understanding wording so you know whether something is a fact or an opinion and how to figure out if it is actually a fact. The first page we did dealt with how to verify a fact. Brianna, being a child of this day and age, said google it. *sigh* Rule of the day was NO GOOGLE. Also learning to be specific. The first one was about a specific French scientist who made lots of medical discoveries. Brianna wanted to look up discoveries. When I showed how that would never work she went to French scientists. Well that's a little closer, but I'm sure there's still LOTS of those. It took an amazingly long time to figure out that she should look up the exact scientist to find out the facts about him.

We went back to the beginning of our spelling program, Spell by Color. 5 lessons in, she couldn't remember older rules. And since she was still spelling words covered by the beginning of the program wrong, she obviously wasn't retaining them. Thankfully we were only 5 weeks in!

Olivia likes to "help" Brianna with her schoolwork
Tuesday - We started back into her big curriculum book to finish up the English section. She's done pretty well in this level of English, so I don't see it being a problem to fly through it.

She does have a problem with skimming reading comprehension stories though. I mean, if it's a book that she's picked out and wants to read, she can tell you in great detail what everything's about. So I KNOW the reading comprehension is there. If anything she's well above the 3rd grade level. However, it's an important life skill to be able to pick out details of boring stuff (ya know, reading the fine print of contracts, ect...)

Wednesday - Brianna just loved today. For science we identified different types of leaves. We went around the neigbourhood and gathered all the different kinds we could find. Then divided them between palmate, pinnate and needle types. Brianna sketched and labeled each one. A couple we had to look up because we weren't sure. Once we were done we prepped them to be pressed so we can keep them.




Thursday - Today was a no school day cause we put the garden in! Well, I did most of it, but Brianna helped weed and designed signs (we'll be making smaller and laminated ones later, but she couldn't wait!)


Friday - Brianna saved 3 of her 4 math sheets today. This is one of the problems I warned her would come up with our new schedule if she left all her unliked stuff til Friday. Math Meltdown!!!! After about 6 hours, we got the 90 minutes of work done. *sigh*

Clay fun!

Check out other weekly wrap-ups at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

3 comments:

  1. We have Math struggles with my daughter here too, but she's getting a better! (We use Saxon which has a lot of built-in review, so I made a deal with her: if she get an 85% or better on the even problems she doesn't have to do the odds. And if she gets less than 85% she does the odds the NEXT day. It's helped with her meltdowns!)

    LOVE the leave study! And the garden signs are adorable! They'll look AWESOME in your in garden!

    Jessy

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  2. Hi, haven't read your blog yet but looking forward to it. I'm just leaving a message here hoping you'll get it because I don't have your email address, and I wanted to send you an invite for my blog. Could you email me isabel.snow@zoneconsulting.com.au please? (Is at snowflakesinthevalley)

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  3. That's a good idea Jessy! Her big issue is with the math pages that look like non-stop problems. Ya know, a sheet with nothing but adding problems for example. I'll have to give that a try with the next one :)

    Thanks Mama Snow! I'll email ya right away :)

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