Weekly Wrap Up

 

 

Winter hit Alberta this week.  I guess that’s our cue to buckle down a little and get some book work done.  We’ll see if that happens or not.  I think the kids are doing pretty good with their learning.  Let’s see how the week went.

 

Monday was really good.  I believe that it was Monday that Matthias slept all morning.  I was able to get a lot of work done with the older girls.  In fact I think they pushed me to get more and more pages completed in their character study and science books.  Kristyn really wants to get through this unit on honesty and self-control because the starting page (a page to color) of the next unit has horses on it.  I don’t think she even knows what the next unit is about but it must be good to have horses in it.

Monday is choir.  Thursday is dance.  I know the choir is preparing for a couple of Christmas concerts.  The girls are getting so excited.  As the special days approach I get tidbits of information.  Up until now, I haven’t heard anything about their choir performances.  I have no idea what the songs are, except that they are related to the season.  Dance is the same way.  In the first excitement of dance, I got a little bit of information about their costumes, but other than that, I have no idea what they are learning or performing.  I love that the girls want to keep what they are doing a secret.  It adds to the mystery and excitement for them and for me.

 

We learned some steps to gain self-control and were reminded that changing does not happen overnight.  We talked about those of us in our family who are quick tempered and those who are quite self-controlled.  We talked about ways we can help each other when we are loosing control.  Out of these conversations we have developed a plan for when Mommy is loosing it because the house needs tidying, supper needs cooking and baby is screaming while Miss Rayna gets into everything.  Cora takes the baby because he responds well to her.  Mommy or Kristyn cook supper while the other gets the other three cleaning the floor.  It works foe us.

Next we talked about lies.  We’ve been dealing with a lot of lying (and mixed in, a lot of blame) in our house.  Some of the children have been writing lines – I will not lie.  We read and discussed Proverbs 12:22.  We learned such terms as “detests” and “delights”.  We need some more discussion on the topic over time.

 

In science, we talked more about the second day of creation.  More specifically we talked about the cycle of water and the various forms of precipitation.  The girls found this very interesting that frost was water as a gas that froze when it touched the cold window or the grass.  I love studying this science stuff with them.  I never did really well in any of the sciences in high school; in fact, if I remember correctly, it was biology that almost cost me my diploma and valedictory.  I love being reminded and re-learning about the world around me with the girls.

 

The Letter of the Week was the letter G.  I don’t think the activities went over very well.  The word or theme was gumball.  I think the whole week would have gone over better if the theme would have been gorilla or another animal.  There didn’t seem to be a lot of interest in the preK material this week.  Maybe the children are getting bored of doing the same activities over and over again.  I suspect that after Christmas I will see a renewed interest from Wyatt and Marrissa.  You can see the books we read in my What My Children Are Reading post for this week.  We really liked some of these books; the older girls enjoyed reading them to their younger siblings!

 

We didn’t get as much math done as I would have liked this week, but they are both learning some new concepts and are struggling with them a little bit.  I’ve cut the two required pages down to one page a day for this past week; next week we’ll go back up to 2 pages a day with the understanding that the concepts are harder and may take more time to complete.  Cora completed 3.5 pages teaching about telling time.  She’s getting it but it’s slow going.  Kristyn has moved on to double digit addition and subtraction; she’s learned that she can check her own work, but she doesn’t care to.  She still prefers that I make sure she’s done it correctly.  She completed 4 pages this week.  She is looking forward to learning how to put an 11 in a ones place, because you can’t put two numbers in one position; I think the official term is regrouping.

 

Striving to learn and live God's purposes,