Week 29-30 in ECC: Russia

The last two weeks have been interesting.

Bible time was good. We've had more discussions. There were lots of end times passages that we didn't totally understand, but we discussed them. AWANA is over for the year. So, that speeds up our morning time.

For Geography, we read about Russia, made a Russian flag, tried to pronounce some Russian words, and played the Geography Game. Pooh was disappointed every day that we didn't make the Russian flag. He really enjoys doing the flags as a craft. Rabbit enjoyed the Russian Ballerina page. We didn't learn how to play chess, as suggested in the manual. Dad has taught her a little, but I don't think she gets it yet. Maybe next time.

In Science, it was mostly reading about the Arctic. The second week, we just picked books from the book basket to read about science. Rabbit did a couple of science pages. Even Pooh wanted to make science pages.

For Music, we listened to the one Russian song, but we've pretty much been skipping it. For the Art projects, though, we've done those. I found nesting boxes at Michaels, but only 3 deep. I let her decorate those however. Then we did the Jeweled Egg project the next week. It was really hard to empty the eggs without breaking them. But, once I did, I remembered that I was given a box of stuff that my grandfather's 4th wife had used to decorate eggs. (She was really into it, and cut them open and put scenes inside them and everything.) So, we used the beads and ric-rac to create an egg. We each did one. I'll post pictures later.

We keep plowing trough Math. Rabbit only got an 83 on her last quiz, but they were mistakes from not lining up numbers correctly and such. She is pretty well enjoying Quarter Mile Math, but she is getting frustrated that she doesn't always beat her best time.

We keep going through Sequential Spelling. I keep asking her if she wants to change. I don't think she is really "getting" the rules. And I thought about switching to All About Spelling. So, I show her the web-site and an example lesson, and she asks, "Does it have a spelling workbook?" So I say, "What do you mean?" She says, "You know, a special book to write the words in." So this is the whole issue with spelling - she wants a bound notebook/workbook to write in. ARRGGH! I showed her some of her dad's composition notebooks, wondering if she would accept that as a spelling notebook, but I'm not sure. Grrr.

We did 6 more lessons in Primary Language Lessons. One of them I made into a fill in the blank. Some of them were writing letters, and since we had thank you notes to write for a recent birthday, we've been doing those for some of the PLL lessons and the Writing lessons.

Since AWANA is over, we've added in a little bit of keyboarding. I keep forgetting, so we haven't done much, but she is excited to start, and we will work on it over the summer.

We have to do 15 more days of school by state law, but I have 20 more days of curriculum - at least Bible, Geography, and Science. I think at the end of the 15 days, we'll do our 3rd grade testing as required. Then we'll just do Bible, Geography, and Science of those last 5 days - taking a break from everything else, and then switch over to "school lite" - which will be Math, Spelling, Typing, and Reading.