summary school week #17

I shook up our rhythms a bit starting this week, deciding to focus on just one curriculum story per week in order to feel less rushed now that the kids are involved in more outside pursuits. I'll describe the changes as I go along with this post.

This was the third week of our second math block, and we focused on greater than/less than (J is showing off one of the symbols we made to go with our story work this week), which I blogged about here and here.


Since the kids are each taking multiple classes with our Monday Homeschool Class group, I decided that we didn't need to be trying to squeeze in work with our curriculum that day as well, as the day was full enough. This week, however, was a Monday holiday, and we had a fairly unstructured day in which the kids were able to explore my spinning wheel and the interest in gears that it promoted.



J folded an origami "bomber" and made some bombs, then drew a bomber dropping letters rather than bombs -- note the "creative spelling".

Tuesdays Zoo Boy has formal Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy, and both boys have a very active lunchtime playdate with homeschooling friends, so I felt that doing circle on that day does not make sense. So we are participating in our current Adventure Circle on Wednesdays through Saturdays instead. We do read our Curriculum Story for the week on Tuesday morning, however, so that the kids have a chance to sleep on it before we start working with it on Wednesdays.


The kids have created a game that uses silk scarves to represent various types of Pokemon, and have been having a lot of fun playing this game during their creative playtime this week.


We work with our Math (currently) or Language Arts (next block!) curriculum story on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings. Wednesdays afternoons are for painting or baking, Thursday afternoons are usually museum classes (although this Thursday we got together with a group of homeschoolers at the library), and Friday afternoons are gym classes and playdates. Friday evenings are for reading a Nature Story (Science curriculum), then we work with the Nature Story on Saturday, with artistic digestion in the morning, and a related activity, craft, or field trip in the afternoon. (This week, however, I managed to pick up a stomach virus on Friday night, incapacitating me for the weekend and eliminating science curriculum for this week!)


J shoots a basket in his Friday gym class. This week was, obviously, Basketball.

We do practice work (handwriting -- letter practice sheets -- and reading) Monday through Friday. This week J was reading Mummies in the Morning (a Magic Treehouse Series book by Mary Pope Osborn), and Zoo Boy finished up reading Little Bear and started Father Bear Comes Home (both from the Little Bear Series by Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak).


Storytime stories this week were Snowballs by Lois Ehlert and Winter on the Farm by Laura Ingalls Wilder, illustrated by Jody Wheeler and Renee Graef. We also started reading a new chapter book, The Indian in the Cupboard, by Lynne Reid Banks, but we had to abandon it early on, as Zoo Boy found it too frightening. (Something about a small plastic man coming to life and stabbing it's owner with it's knife was scary to him... go figure.... It actually seems to have more to do with the fact that the figure was a birthday present, and his birthday is in just a couple of weeks. He told me that we could read it in a month that none of us has a birthday in, like maybe August.) So we took a break from chapter books for the rest of the week, and will start up with something less threatening this week.