ECC 2nd Edition: Week 3

Thought I would change over to a weekly format now that the first couple of weeks are under our belts. 

This week was weird - it started on a Friday, then a weekend, then only 3 days of school, and then a 4 day weekend (with a camping trip), and one more day the following week to finish. I will have to add a padding day to get Monday in the TM to be on Thursday, due to all our outside activities on Wednesday, but not a big deal.

I tried both ways of the schedule; some days doing Bible, geography, science and then the rest, especially if we got started late. If we started on time, we did spelling first, then the other language arts and math, with geography and science right before lunch. I need to be more disciplined about starting on time. Either way can work for our schedule, I just need consistency for my sanity. If I switch, then I have trouble making sure we do everything.

Science and geography seemed a little easier this week. There was a map to do, but it felt a little lighter. Tigger loved making a science page from Living World Encyclopedia, but I had to make him finish it after regular school hours.

Rabbit started her geography packet this week. So far we've known what it was talking about or only needed the Classroom Atlas to find the information. We are having a little trouble finding all the information we want for our country summary page, though. One of the things we are suppose to find is the top products, but that hasn't been easy. Even a Google search didn't bring us what we wanted. We'll hit the library in earnest next week on this.  I didn't get a chance to do any pages with the boys, but figured we have several weeks to work on it. I need to schedule their flag sticker book - maybe have them do 4 or 5 flags a day.

Most of all the other subjects are going okay for the boys. Handwriting is a challenge for Pooh. I made pages for the kids to copy the character qualities from Hero Tales, with cursive example, and Pooh translated it back to print! Giving him lines to trace seems very 1st or 2nd grade for a 4th grader. Not sure what I'm going to do. I may have to give him pages where the words are right above a blank line. That seems to work best for him.

Rabbit had 2 tests this week. She got a 90% on her Applications of Grammar test #2, and an 83% on her Apologia Physical Science test for Module 2. She is doing okay in everything but Math. We have tears nearly every day, which is hard on me. She gets worked up if she misses a problem, and then it starts carrying over to other problems. I'm still not sure 100% if we should stick with Saxon, but we'll keep going.

We did the ultimate nature walk on our camping trip: we went to the top of Mt. Evans (the highest paved road in North America). At over 14,000 feet, it is basically like arctic tundra at the top. We saw mountain goats this year. (We went last year, but the road all the way to the top wasn't open, but we saw big horn sheep last year.) 

The whole family at the top of Mt. Evans.

Just the kids at the top of Mt. Evans. There was this big stack of rocks they climbed up on.

This is the Geological Survey Marker at the top.

Especially glad to see some wildlife at the top - mountain goats!

Oh, I did have the kids work on a craft on one of our days off. The boys wanted to do the Coup Sticks, so I went to Michael's over the weekend and got dowels, feathers, and ribbon to use to make them.

Kids with their Coup Sticks craft.

Rabbit did have a science experiment this week from Apologia. The first time we did it, we didn't get the expected results. But the second time, we "got the desired effect" as rabbit put it. Here's the video where it didn't work:

But, what was cool about it, was that the can sucked up all the water in the bowl. I think it was because we didn't let the water come to a vigorous boil. The second time, well, just watch:

Week 3 completed! Now, onto week 4. Well, we're going to do a "fill in" day - P.E. classes and worship dance classes start tomorrow, so we'll just do Spelling, Math, Reading, AWANA, and piano practice - because that's about all we'll be able to fit in before we need to eat lunch and head to P.E. class. Then Thursday we will start week 4.

Oh, and I did decide to use a Homeschool Buyers Co-op discount for Timez Attack to do math drill. Pricey, we'll see if it was worth it.