Saturday, April 16, 2011

weekly wrap-up, week 28

Spring sure is taking it's own sweet time at getting rolling this year, we're still walking in winter coats! It's been fairly dry too (despite the deluge going on out there right now). Weird, weird weather...

We started the new week by taking the kids to see a really wonderful production of "Alice in Wonderland" (the musical) on Saturday evening. It was every bit as delightfully disturbing as the book, and we all quite enjoyed watching the ensemble transform themselves into all the various characters. I don't remember ever laughing so hard at a live theater production.

Sunday found us, as usual, at J's chorus rehearsal. Just a few weeks until the show. I won't be too sorry not to have to drive so far on Sunday evenings once it's over.

The bunnies are getting bigger! So The Map Man has been working on constructing a larger cage for them with various cage pieces and equipment from my bunny breeding days. Meanwhile, the kids have been taking extremely good care of them, with only gentle reminders from us on occasion as needed. The Man and I both agree that getting them was a very good idea. The boys have also taken a bit more responsibility with the daily farm chores again, now that the footing out there is no longer treacherous.

We started our schoolwork for the week with some paintings inspired by our poem from last week ("The Hills in the Highlands"). On the left is J's, on the right is Zoo Boy's:











The rest of the week we worked on Journals (which I've been keeping private for the sake of, well, privacy!), read a Scottish fairy tale called "The Black Bull of Norroway," and began working with our next sage, John Muir. I posted their sage story work separately. And of course all of our usual practice work. This week's poem has been "The Weaving of the Tartan," by Alice Macdonell, although we are only reciting it, not doing any copy work from it since there is enough writing during their main lesson work when we're working with a sage story.


Here's a copy of some of Zoo Boy's speech therapy homework, practicing his "r" sounds as they associate with various vowels. J had his Social Thinking group, and they had a blast as usual playing games in perspective taking and idea building. He also had piano and guitar lessons, and we all had a nice visit (and a nice walk!) with our friends afterwards. We visiting more friends on Wednesday afternoon as well. And J had his usual 5 dance classes, plus a ballet show rehearsal, while Zoo Boy helped me out with grocery shopping and accompanied The Map Man on his evening walks.


We wrapped up our week with our fun (as always!) Science Fridays meeting, which I posted about here.


Today we had a family birthday party (more fun!) and tomorrow we have plans to (hopefully) get a bunch of spring farm maintenance work done ahead of breeding some of our ducks and getting some new chicks in a few weeks. We'll see how wet it is out there and whether or not that impedes our progress -- it's pouring pretty good at the moment, but it's supposed to clear up by morning, hopefully leaving us a nice spring day to get a bunch of work done!

2 comments:

Stacey said...

What is the speech therapy homework thing? I'm curious . . .We had a speech therapy catastrophe a few months ago and are laying low for a little bit about speech. but i know we'll need to pick it back up somewhere else. r sounds are my girls' main issue.

Harvest Moon Farm said...

Stacey, he uses the dots or squiggles or whatever to count the repetitions of the sounds. So he's going "ra, ra, ra, ra" as I point at each dot. (He created the chart while making the sounds during his speech therapy session.) The long lines, he makes one shound and holds it out while I drag my finger along it. And the zig zag, he makes one sound for each zig and zag.

I hope that makes sense, it's much easier to show than it is to explain! We also play games from a list of "r" and "r blend" words -- we play squares, with "r" words on the axises, he has to say the word to draw the line. And tic tac toe, he has a choose a word from the list and say it 3 times before he writes his "x" on the board. That sort of thing. Also making up sentences and stories using the words from the list.