Tuesday, August 5, 2014

CTG: Week 1, Day 2 and AHL Week 6, Day 2

Okay, well, today was better because we finished at 4:00, rather than 4:30.

I tried something a little different today. I printed all our subjects from Creation to the Greeks onto strips of paper, folded the paper strips up, and stuck them into a jar. Then I had the boys take turn pulling strips to decide what to do next. That didn't work very well because they didn't want to do spelling. I thought it might be fun, but they didn't buy into it. Tonight I talked to them about what order they would like to do things. Of course, they didn't agree. I think I will come up with an order that considers what they want a little, though.

The boys are loving the Science in the Beginning, even if I am making them do notebook pages. I had to hunt down colored pencils so they could draw their rainbows, and help them with the wording for the explanation. But, I do think it will be very memorable and they will retain what they learn from doing the notebooks. We will do science first on the days I have it scheduled, since they love it so much.

Math was a long Review in the workbook, so I decided to break that up over two days. They are more than halfway through the Singapore 4A book, so it's not a big deal if we do this every now and then.

The Bible and History really go together quite a bit this year, so I really think we will do those two subject together. The boys think it is funny that I'm taking notes on what they say when I ask, "What do we learn about God in this passage?" 

I still haven't heard from either library on my book basket books. A friend of my husbands from his work gave us a book called The Book of Jewish Holidays by Ruthe Lurie Kozodoy. I read a section of it to the boys about the Sabbath. It is interesting reading about the holiday from a more Jewish perspective. I really liked this line from the book, "Our tradition teaches us to stop working on the seventh day too. As God did, we look at what we have done to see if it is good." I really like that idea: looking back at your week honestly and just seeing if what you did was good.

Of course we did the other subjects too: English, Reading, Vocabulary, Handwriting, and Spelling. In Spelling, Pooh finished the All About Spelling Level 2 book! Has he mastered it? Not perfectly. But I just don't feel like I can keep him at the same level any longer. He has to move forward. We've been through the material twice. I will continue drilling him and pray he makes progress.

As we were finishing up school after lunch, Rabbit started on her Spanish. While she was working on that, I assigned the boys to work on making the challah covering. I had bought a blank handkerchief and fabric paints last week. Then we looked at the design in the Celebrating the Biblical Feast books and did a google search of images of challah coverings. I told them to design one that would be nice and honor God. They did a terrific job all by themselves.


Rabbit is having a pretty easy time in Spanish. She's done the Rosetta Stone level 1 enough that she is pretty familiar with it. So, I had her listen to the Spanish phonograms tracks from The Easy Spanish CD to start learning those. And, I had her read the introduction to a chapter on Spanish verbs in a workbook I picked up from Barnes and Noble. I am truly amazed that she has been able to learn Spanish, given her dyslexia. But, we did start when she was 5 with Power Glide, so she's been exposed to it for a long time.

Next, I went over her AHL work - checked her answers, skimmed her books. She has been doing a good job getting it done. Then we did math for an hour. We still didn't complete the lesson, but she did a good job on the problems with the new concept. She needed a little refresher on one of the previous lessons, though. Hopefully we finish it tomorrow. 

She typed up her Exploring World History project this morning, so I looked that over. When we ran the spell check, it said she had a 9.3 grade level. After a little editing, it went down to an 8.6 grade level. I think it was because we took some of her long-worded sentences that were a little confusing and made them two sentences. The shorter sentences knocked down the grade level. I told her for tomorrow, she needs to work on eliminating the word "probably" - she used it too much. She definitely has the word count, and seems to have thought through her essay.

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