summary school week #16

Here's my guys, all decked out in 3-D glasses to watch the special 3-D commercials during halftime of the Super Bowl.

This was a short but busy week for us. Due to a work commitment on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I had to abandon my family for three days, which only really gave me half a week to work with the boys. But the amount of stuff we actually got done was pretty amazing.

We of course continued to use our Snowy Adventure Circle. Our curriculum story this week was "Miss Many More", an Enki Education 1st Grade Math story, which laid the groundwork for counting-by. We drew from the story, and made a blueberry pie (the kids insisting on counting out our berries like in the story, by 1s, 2s, 3s, and 5s). This photos shows them working on our pie.

Monday was the first day of the winter semester for our Monday Homeschool Classes. J is taking Chorus, Sheep to Scarf (taught by yours truly), and Roots and Shoots/Earth Scouts (a service club). Zoo Boy is taking Nature Explorers (with his favorite museum educator, Ms. Rachel), and Fun with Fiber (another class I'm teaching, for the younger set).


Tuesday we met some fun new homeschooling friends for lunch, then had Zoo Boy's therapy sessions.

Wednesday we spent baking up a storm all afternoon, since the weather prevented me from being able to work. In this photo, Zoo Boy is mixing ingredients for Cinnamon Bread, while in the foreground Chicken Squares cool. This was also the day we made our pie, so our Oven was kept busy all day.

On Thursday morning we made our 100 chart. And on Thursday afternoon, both boys had a fun museum class about woodchucks and Groundhog's Day.

J explains a story line he set up with his Lego Agents set.

Practice time really fell apart this week. The Map Man was home sick for two days in the middle of the week, and combined with my planned absence at the end of the week, our end-of-day rhythms pretty much fell into shambles. So the kids read whatever they wanted to on their own rather than having any sort of formal practice time.

This drawing might be hard to explain. This is J's artistic rendition of the Enki Education verse to support writing "8", which goes "Jump around, curve on back, swim right up to eat your snack", or something like that (I can't find the actual verse now). What's interesting about this is that as the kids were writing out their 100 chart, J started reciting these number verses, which we'd used during our first math block (and only during the actual writing of each individual number), and haven't mentioned since. During Zoo Boy's turn at writing on the chart, J created this drawing that shows stick figures acting out the "8" verse.

Like our evening rhythms, pretty much the same thing happened to our Story Time before bed. Although we DID read, we didn't read any picture books this week as a family. Instead, I read to them from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl. The kids are very much enjoying the story, especially Zoo Boy. Both are dreaming of visiting a chocolate factory. A dream that I'm pretty sure I can make happen, as there is a local chocolate factory not far from here. I also found out that one of their cousins is performing in a stage production of the story this spring, so we'll try to get out to NY to see that.