Weekly Wrap Up - End of the Regular School Year

We school year round but we do move to a much lighter schedule in the summer. In part because Brianna has several activities (Park Leaders and swimming for example) but also, simply because it's summer! However, even our last few weeks of "regular" school are much slower. Partially because of just having a busy time this June, but also just because the weather's getting warmer and we want to be outside! So this weekly wrap up is a couple weeks

After a few months of refusing, I finally convinced her to write in her notebook. Here we worked on her name, drawing 4 shapes and writing our phone number

We did our Iceland country study.

Brianna moved into volume in math and pouted that the world wasn't full of little cubes (a la Minecraft?) to count. After spending 10 minutes whining about not being able to figure out volume without the cubes, she finally read the instructions and asked "is it really just area times the height?!?!?!" Insert mom giggling in a corner.

She finally finished her Gr. 5 Math Mammoth curriculum (as said in earlier posts, she repeated it due to not fully understanding and shoddy work ethic). I base our homeschool on Mastery, which we view as 80% or higher. Brianna got 74% on the curriculum's provided final test, but as the last time she got 51%, I passed her because of the fantastic improvement!

Olivia is more and more interested in time. She knows what the clock looks like for morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack and supper, but doesn't really understand how that corresponds to "time". We're also working on the span of time - yesterday, today, tomorrow, ect...

Brianna occasionally joins me for my walks. This week we did a 3.5 mile walk and enjoyed some of the beautiful scenery in our city

Brianna did her final English essay as an argumentative essay on her bedtime. After explaining what she needed to do (on her choice of topic), she ran away with it. She did fantastic!

By the way, she won. Her bedtime was moved :)

Brianna loves Report Cards. I don't "issue" one at specific intervals, but I do generally at least provide her with one at the end of June, before we move into our summer schedule. Not surprisingly, she was very happy with this one!

Olivia chose to do Pirates for her next unit. We got some great printables from Homeschool Creations, 1+1+1=1, Over The Big Moon and Homeschool Share.

She LOVED this pirate game I found

"Ps are eeeeeeeasy"

Olivia is not completely ready for the You Can Read program. She enjoys the work but doesn't seem to grasp the concept of remembering that this specific combination of letters = this specific word. No biggie. We'll give it another go in the fall. As she would only be going into Senior (or 5 year old) Kindergarten this September if she were in public school, I'm not at all worried about her "lack of reading".

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Weekly Wrap Up x2

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Weekly Training:
None happened this week. The weather just sucked and I wish we hadn't gotten that spurt of nice weather, then back to normal. The girls have been doing daily workouts though.

Monday - For the 3rd day in a row, Brianna did her school work first thing in the morning. And as a bonus, since she was still doing her when Tanya showed up, it got Tanya right to work too instead of their usual playing before a herd them to the kitchen. *fingers crossed* that this keeps up!

Tuesday - Still going with first thing in the morning school *yay* Brianna and I planted our egg shell seeds. After sorting out the ones that were too small or broken, we ended up with 2 dozen egg shells to fill. We planted potted-strawberries, green peppers, mini mixed peppers, pumpkins and cherry and beefsteak tomatoes.

Wednesday - Since Brianna's still doing her school work first thing in the morning. I had her catch up on the graphing portion of their geography class while Tanya did her work for the day.

Thursday - A quiet day with boring work lol

Friday - Tanya had church duties due to Easter so didn't come today. I had Brianna catch up on the photo periods for geography to go with the graphing she did on Wednesday

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Monday - Didn't *happen* on Monday, but it's all she talked about so we'll add it here lol On Sunday, Brianna made almost our entire Easter Dinner herself.

Tuesday - A quiet day with boring work lol

Wednesday - We FINALLY caught up completely on geography. The girls used the 3 weeks of clues to try to find educated guesses of where the Mystery Locations were. On Friday the last of the clues will be out, but since we planned Titanic stuff for Friday and the following Monday, we'll be doing them next Wednesday

Thursday - My mom's been helping me with marking the girls work while I try to find all the stuff I need to catch Tanya up to where she "should be". We've discovered that she has no clue how to punctuate or capitalize properly (or very often) and strangely has almost no clue about fractions. This is strange because she cooks and bakes and doesn't seem to screw up recipes that use measuring cups. Her most memorable mistake was for a question that asked if a cake is cut into 1/8ths or 1/4ths, which would be a bigger piece. Her answer? "It doesn't matter, it's the same cake" *facepalm*

Friday - We began our Titanic unit (which will have it's own blog post later).

First Term Ends, Christmas and Back to School

I've broken up our years into 6 wk periods or terms when Brianna will get a report card (she insists). That said, I obviously do grading. I found a great grading sheet, but can't remember where I got it from cause there is no site name or copyright name anywhere on the pages. I'll see if I can find it.

Here's what our first 6 wks looks like gradewise:
Math - 79%
Science - 72%
English - 82%
Geography - 73%
History - 73%
Art/Music - 83%
Phys Ed/Health - 83%
Computer - 82%
LifeSkills - 87%
Spelling - 81%
French - 82%

Now I've just got to get my printer connected to this laptop (if it even will) so I can make a paper report card for Brianna.

We took a 4 day weekend for Christmas. While we were too busy to do school anyways, it felt really weird not to be doing school on Friday and Monday. Even Brianna was asking about school. So I don't think we'll be able to take long breaks. Of course that's my fault since even when she was in PS we did homeschool during Christmas, March and summer vacations.

So now, after that short break, we're back to school. It was an ok day. The first part of her day went fine, but the second half was slow and dragging. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. 

We have a slower week this week as well, so hopefully I can get some planning done as after this week I only have sporadic plans done.

Frustrated!

Today I finally got around to making up Brianna's summer report card. Found a nice template in Microsoft Office for homeschool. Got it all typed up and professional looking (Brianna insists on a report card and I like the idea). Go to print.... blank page! WTH? Try again on a different setting. Nope, blank page. So I try running the nozzle cleaner. Holy crap, there's like nothing printing! There's ZERO color on the page and very smudged faint black. Now, I've got 3/4 of a cartridge of color and a little less than half of a black one. Why isn't it printing?!?! So I took out the cartridges, clean, re-print, clean, re-print.... No go. If anything, it's getting worse. I know if you don't use it for a while the ink can dry up, but i just used to printer to make the baby's birthday party invites 2 mths ago! So I'm looking at about $80 in printer cartridges going to the garbage *cry* I'm going to try taking them to one of those refill places to see if they have an idea, but otherwise I'm gonna be stuck buying new cartridges :(

On another note, I finished another homeschooling book, Homeschooling Step-by-Step. Pretty informative! I wish I could find more Canadian homeschooling books, but 90% of the stuff in the American ones are relevant to Canada anyways. Wanting to start putting together lesson plans, but with the printer issue, that's out of the question for a couple days....