Weeks Eight, Nine, and Ten

These last few weeks have been insanely busy with field trips, a birthday, doctors appointments and career changes, so I'll just do a quick recap of all three weeks.

Math

Emily started multiplication, finished multiplication, and moved on to division in Singapore 2A.  I'm really hoping to finished 2A before Christmas break so we can start 2B in January.

Cami's been working on her addition facts to 10 in RightStart.  She's picked up on these really fast, I think because she can visualize it so well from working with the abacus so much.    

Language Arts

Cami finished working on CVC words and words that begin and end in the /k/ sound in Phonics Pathways.  I love that I can teach spelling right along with it so easily.  She usually does two pages every day and one page of Explode the Code.  I'm so proud of how much her fluency's improved.  A couple months ago she was struggling with BOB readers but now she's reading Henry and Mudge with ease.  Yay, Cami!

Emily finished reading Ribsy and started Gulliver's Travels (Classic Starts).  She's also reading ahead in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in her own time.  You wouldn't believe how many times a day I catch her in the bathroom reading when she's supposed to be doing schoolwork!

We've worked through Lesson 14 in First Language Lessons 3.  So far we've covered common and proper nouns, verbs, pronouns and adjectives.  We've also memorized Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, The Land of Nod and started diagramming sentences.

We're taking a break from Writing Tales until December for NaNoWriMo.  The girls have been developing the main characters for their novels and have come up with some, um, interesting ideas.  It took awhile to convince Cami that she can't just rip off the storyline of Harry Potter and put her name on it.  So she settled on a princess for her main character named Fire Blue Basil.  She came up with this name two years ago when she was three and has used it for every single stuffed animal and barbie she's ever had since then, so it was the obvious choice. 

History

 

We learned about the Yamato Dynasty in Japan in Story of the World.  We got out our markers, glitter, paint, fabric scraps, and magazines and decorated a giant paper kimono.  The girls got pretty creative with it.

Later in the week we made fish kites for Japan's Boy Day.

This week we're learning about Australia and New Zealand.  

Science

Nothing to report here.  We haven't done science in at least a month.  I think I'll start making Saturday science day.  We did go to Chemistry Club with our homeschooling group once last week, which was very cool.

Let's see...Emily went to Chess Club and both girls went to their first First Junior Lego League meeting.  Their challenge is Biomedical Engineering and the team decided to build an ambulance.  On Tuesday we went on a field trip to the Sheriff's office where the kids all got fingerprinted and got to check out a police cruiser. 

Other than that we've been getting ready for Halloween. We tie-dyed some shirts orange and decorated them with a Sharpie. The kids usually pick characters from whatever book we're reading at the time and this year's no different.  Cami's going as Harry Potter and Emily's Hermione when she turned herself into a cat.  Ian's going as Dobby the House-Elf, of course, who else?