Week 18 in CTG

Not a bad week, overall. We ended up starting last Thursday, so our "light and independent Friday" falls on Wednesday. This will be good, as the boys will be taking a P.E. class on Wednesdays, and Rabbit's dance class will be on Wednesdays when it starts. We'll need a lighter school day.

Bible this week covered Gideon and Samson. It is the time of the Judges. I find it interesting that the Israelites had trouble following God unless they had a strong leader. And even then, some of the Judges weren't that great (especially Samson).

Our new Greek root this week was helios. We had fun finding words in the dictionary and guessing what they might mean based on the other Greek roots we already know. Rabbit missed one (logos) on her quiz, though. I haven't started playing the games recommended in the T.M. with Rabbit. I really should, as they look like fun. But, some days Kindergarten is taking 2 hours with the boys!

We are progressing well on spelling. We've almost finished Book 3. Rabbit's spelling is not perfect, but it is improving greatly. I went ahead and ordered Book 4. I think the new format is really helping Rabbit learn her words better.

Rabbit is having trouble mastering her divide by 4 and divide by 6 facts. I keep working with her. We've moved on to calculating averages. She wanted to know why, and it was hard for me to come up with reasons.

Monday and Tuesday, and a little on Thursday, were History days. We learned about the people of Canaan, the Hittites and the Philistines. I personally read a book recommended in the manual called Hittite Warrior. First, it is a very good book, and is a great fictional story set in the time of History we are covering. I've chosen not to read it to Rabbit as a read aloud as she is only 9. The book covers a lot of the sacrificing to the other gods of the time, Molech especially. It was hard enough for me to read it. I'm sure it would have upset Rabbit.

Science... Sigh... Once again, we're about 50/50 on the success rate. For the life of me, I cannot get Match Rockets to work. The foil just burned up. The match might "jump" off its launch pad, but it didn't fly. I did get the see-through-egg experiment to work and didn't even break the egg. I let the egg set in a jar with a lid for about 26 hours. When we scooped out the egg, it's shell was completely gone. I think the picture in the book is a little misleading. It implies that you could see through the egg clearly. That was not the case with our egg. However, we did hold it up to the light and could easily see the yolk that way. We didn't do the two-state rocket experiment, but it is one I plan on hitting sometime - if we could just find a day with time to do it.

Art this week was all about drawing nature. Alas, it was way to cold to go outside (below freezing!) to do any drawing. So, for one thing she drew a silk flower that I had. We'll have to wait for a nature study when it warms up.

In reading we've switched back to an Abeka 4th grade reader. Rabbit still has trouble with names. We've only been reading together for about 15 minutes. She's been reading her Bible for another 15 at bed time, plus books from the library, so I figure she's getting in 30 minutes, at least.

The Spanish lesson this week was about horses, so at least that captured her attention.

The Abeka K program is driving me crazy. Some days it is taking me over 2 hours to do K with both boys. One thing that is hard is some days (days when they read to me), they'll have lots of seatwork - like 5 pages. That is a lot of writing for my two boys. So, I've changed it so they only have to do the tracing parts on the writing pages when there are lots of pages. That's helped them. I'm thinking next year, even if My Father's World First Grade program has handwriting, I'm going to have to get a Handwriting Without Tears workbook for them to increase their skill and endurance on writing. On a good note, they are reading short-vowel words (okay, they often are still sounding them out, but still) and love the fact that they have special little readers to read. They love using the blocks in the Math-U-See Primer book. It is funny how they each do the book differently. Tigger builds each problem, colors the blocks and writes the numbers one at a time. Pooh builds all the problems, then goes through and colors all the 1 blocks and writes their number, then all the 2 blocks and writes their numbers and so on. It still takes them about the same amount of time to finish the page.

Glimpses of Progress

You ever wonder if your kid is going to get any better at something? You work at it and work at it and, sigh, you just think, "Is this ever going to get better?"

Rabbit has a small issue with writing. (Well, maybe it's a medium issue.) It is hard for her. Last year we did a lot of double dictation (she would tell me what to write, I would write it and she would copy it), and we still do it for notebooking assignments this year. For many writing assignments, I usually scale things back, or make things multiple choice, or write half of it for her, or something.

Well, the other day we were doing a science experiment with potatoes. (Yes, the one called "Potato Sponges.") Anyway, she got out a piece of paper and wrote 6 sentences (okay, she forgot to capitalize the first letter, but she remembered to put periods) about things she observed about potatoes while we waited for half of one to boil. This was totally her idea. I didn't even realize she had done it until I read the paper today (she left it on the counter). And, the really neat part was she didn't make that many spelling errors. I mean, she made a few, but not like she used to. It definitely wasn't the funky phonetic spelling that I used to see when she did stuff like this. I'm going to save the paper and put it in her science notebook.

Now, sometimes you feel like if you say something, you'l jynx it. But, I don't know, it's like something happened over Christmas. She's not complaining (too much) about writing. She seems to be trying real hard at all her school work. I don't know. It was just a glimpse that maybe it won't always be hard to get her to write.

Starting Back Up

Yesterday we started back to school. (We were going to start Wednesday, but a series of unfortunate events prevented that.) It's gone pretty well. We're on week 18 of Creation to the Greeks and have done 81 of our 172 days of school.

There have been a couple of really good teachable moments this week. When we do "writing station" time with All-About-Spelling, we do it a little differently than the book suggests. I give Rabbit 3 of the words, she writes them, and then has the option of writing as few sentences as possible to use all 3 words. Well, yesterday, she wrote her sentence but it was a really awkward sentence. The good part was, after she wrote it, she recognized that it was awkward. I told her that was great that she knew it wasn't quite right. So, I wrote it on the white board, and we analyzed it together.

Her original sentence was, "The soapy water spreads bubbles while mom mopped the floor." (The 3 words were soapy, bubbles, and mopped - just FYI.) So first I asked her, "How did the soapy water spread the bubbles?" That made her laugh, but she said, "Well, because mom is mopping." Then we talked about how spreads was present tense and mopped was past tense. So, we re-worked it to something like, "When mom mopped the floor with the soapy water, she spread bubbles all over the floor." It was just a good moment to stop and look at something. I told her I'm always re-writing my e-mails and blog posts.

Another teachable moment was with Lesson 52 in Intermediate Language Lessons. It was a writing opposites lesson. So, I got out the Thesaurus and when she didn't know what a word meant or a good opposite, we used the Thesaurus. We talked about synonyms vs. antonyms and how they are listed. I had written out the list of words so she only had to write the opposites down. I also shortened the 2nd and 3rd questions to writing only 3 other pairs of opposites and one sentence.

Today, we were looking up words for the Greek root helios. It was great to put together other Greek roots we've learned - helioscope and heliometer were in my dictionary, so I had her guess what they might mean (we've covered skopeo and metron in previous lessons), and she came pretty close.

Another great moment today was again in spelling. She has had such a hard time remember to use "le" at the end of words like candle - she usually uses "el." Well, one of the writing station words was "candles" and she got it right! And, in dictation there was a sentence with both "too" and "to" and she got those right. I was so excited. I didn't say anything to her, but then the next sentence she wrote "ot" for "to," again. So, I asked her to go back and carefully read her sentence, and she found it. That is progress for her to find her mistake, even if I had to ask her to go read it.

It was too cold today and yesterday to do the science experiments (when it doesn't go above freezing, I don't like going outside), but it is suppose to warm up tomorrow. I hope we'll at least try the Match Rocket experiment. When I told my husband about it, he thought it sounded cool. I just might be able to get him to join us on that one.

The boys are doing fine. They don't always have good attitudes, especially with "review" time, but they still need the review. The letters "g,", "y,", "b," "d", and "q" still give them problems. But, if I tell them, "That's a b," then they do all right with it. Hopefully Monday won't take quite so long.

It hasn't gone bad for an almost 3 week break in school. It is good to be back in our usual routine, that's for sure.

School Over Christmas

Originally, my husband's last day of work was going to be Tuesday of this week. But, then he found out he could still use some of his vacation days the first week of the new year, so he's going to take a few days off then. So his last day will be Friday. Since our weeks are out of alignment from the teacher's manual, I didn't want to do 3 days of school of a week, and then take 2 weeks off, and then finish off the last 2 days of a week. Rabbit needs a little more continuity than that.

The plan for Rabbit is to work on Math, Spelling, Writing and her AWANA T-n-T verses for the rest of this week. The boys are going to be doing Math and Reading/Phonics - focusing on word families for practice. And then, we're going to do a lap book I found at CurrClick called "The Arrival of a King." It is all about the birth of Jesus and all the people in the Bible story. That will cover our Bible and History and Writing and Art (cutting and gluing) for the next 3 days, and maybe even Monday and Tuesday next week. Plus, we'll throw in a little home-ec class with baking some Christmas treats for the neighbors. This will give us our 4 hours a day as needed by state law in order to count as school days.

I've been wanting to try more lap booking, but I didn't think I could design my own. I think doing a big one like this may give me more ideas on some to do next summer.

Week 17 in CTG - Halfway Done!

Whoo-hoo! Half-way done! It is great to get to the half-way point before Christmas.

Bible this week was encouraging. Reading about Joshua's faith as he lead the Israelites into the Promised Land was just uplifting. There was one verse, when we read about when he died, he told the people, "Be very careful to love the Lord your God." I just thought that was so interesting. We usually say, "Be careful!" to our kids when we think they are about to get hurt or do something wrong. And here is Joshua saying, "Be very careful to love the Lord your God." Like you have to watch out for distractions and other things that might keep you from loving Him.

In History we covered basically the fall of Ancient Egypt. It was interesting to read how once the priests were in power, things seemed to deteriorate quite quickly. We read about the Senet game, but didn't make it yet.

We did all the Science experiments this week. We dropped different sized marbles into Moon Sand (tm) to see how craters are formed on the moon. We took a globe, softball, and flashlight into the bathroom to model solar and lunar eclipses. And, we taught Barbie how to bungie jump. That was the favorite - even Tigger and Pooh got into that one. The lesson said to have her dive into a bowl of water, we decided that would be too messy. One thing about Barbie bungie jumping, instead of pushing her off the "diving board" we dropped her from the height of the diving board. We noticed when we pushed her that the rubber bands would reach their maximum stretch at an angle rather than straight down. So, instead of doing that, we held her parallel to the board and then just let her go. For a fun "experiment" I attached another Barbie and asked, "Will they hit the floor or not?" (We had one Barbie stopping about 1 inch above the floor.) The children said they would hit the floor, and they did. Then we talked about how the rubber bands were kind of overcoming gravity when they pull Barbie back. We also talked about how perfect gravity is. It keeps us on the earth, yet we can briefly over come it when we jump. It keeps on on the earth, yet we can lift our hands over our heads. So, it was a good little discussion. Science got an A this week.

In Art, we talked about Warm colors. Rabbit really didn't like making the distinction between warm and cool colors. I had to explain to her that it didn't mean that one set was better than the other, that's just what they were called.

In Reading, Rabbit finished her Pathway reader. We'll start up in the Abeka readers again after the New Year.

In Spelling, we've finished up to Lesson 21 in book 3. Sometimes I'm not sure she has truely mastered a concept. She'll memorize a rule, and can pass the key cards and sound cards and everything, but it doesn't always come out in her writing. But, we keep working on it.

In Math, we're only at lesson 10. But, I am pleased with how she is remember concepts from last year - like multiplying 2 digit numbers together.

For Writing Strands, we are at the lesson describing the placement of furniture in a room. I tried to get her to do Crystal's suggestion of the bathroom, but Rabbit wanted to do the living room. It is fine. We're only going to describe the "major" pieces of furniture, as there is a lot of furniture in the room.

Treasures of the Snow is an awesome book. We are so enjoying it. The kids are always eager to find out what happens next.

Week 16 in CTG

Well, the rest of the week didn't seem as intense as day 1. Whew! I guess sometimes that happens.

For Bible time we are working on memorizing Psalm 23. Rabbit has memorized it before - in Sparks at AWANA. We're doing the NIV version rather than KJV. This week we covered from the Twelve Spies going into Canaan, to Rahab.

In History, it was fun to study what was happening in the Americas during this time period. Some of the similarities and differences between the development of Africa and South America, versus what the North American Indians were doing. Very interesting how the religions between Africa and South America seem similar - with priests in charge, and worship centers and such. Rabbit made the remark at one point, "It just shows you how much they needed Jesus."

We didn't do any of the science. It was too cold to go outside for the Solar Weenie Roaster. And since Rabbit doesn't like fire, we didn't do Solar Peanuts, either. But we talked about how trees take in the sunlight just like peanuts, and when we burn wood, we're burning trees, which means we are releasing the sunlight captured by the tree.

I really enjoyed the lessons from God and the History of Art this week. Rabbit and I did them together, which made it more fun for her, and made it go a little faster.

I love Bach. So much of his music is light and upbeat. We enjoyed listening to the Concertos.

The rest of our topics (Vocabulary, Spelling, Math, Writing Strands, and English) are going well. Rabbit is struggling with divide by 4 and divide by 6, but we'll keep plugging at it.

Week 16, Day 1 in CTG

Well, normally I don't do day-to-day updates, at least not this year.

I am today, just to give a heads up - to me, the Bible and History were especially long today. It took us a little over an hour to get them done. It was good stuff. Rabbit really enjoyed learning about how people first came to North and South America. And while reading the Ancient World book Rabbit dug out our Usborne Book of World History and we looked at some more pictures and ideas of what that time period might be like. So, not that it wasn't good, it just seemed to take a lot longer than usual.

For science, we were suppose to kind of map to scale our solar system. Well, it was snowy and cold, so we didn't do it. But, we discussed the distances and how Jupiter is twice as far away from the sun as the first 4 planets. We should try to do it in centimeters. I'm not to worried about comparing the scale of the planets. A couple of the books in book basket from last week (that we haven't returned yet) had models that showed the planets in scale to each other, but none of them showed distance comparisons.

You know, there's an old joke that goes, "Did you hear about the atheist-insomniac-dyslexic? He lays awake at night wondering if there is a dog." Well, in spelling today, one of our dictation sentences was, "We shopped for dog food and catnip." Rabbit wrote, "We shopped for god food and catnap." Sigh. At least she remember to capitalize and use a period.

English we did on the couch. It was Intermediate Language Lessons lesson 46. We didn't do the dictation part, but we talked about the rest and did the outline.

Math was the area of a triangle. So, I took a couple of pieces of paper, one like a rectangle and the other like a parallelogram and cut them in half to show how they make triangles, so the area is one half of the base times the height. She got it just fine.

We're back to the Pathway reader. The Abeka reader was great. We're almost done with the Pathway reader. I expect we'll be done by the end of this year. I have other Abeka readers, so it's not a problem.

In art, we did complementary colors. I did the lesson with her. I've read about color wheels before, and Primary, Secondary and Tertiary colors and such. But, this lesson with complementary colors just really made a lot of sense to me. I love it when I learn something. It was funny, we were trying to remember the different pairs, and this is what we came up with: red and green are Christmas; blue and orange are the Broncos' (NFL) team colors; and purple and yellow are the colors of the cleaning gloves I use. So, to remember the pairs Rabbit said, "The Broncos played at Christmas wearing Mom's cleaning gloves."

We're at lesson 15 in Spanish. Rabbit told me today she wanted to learn French. Now, why would she suddenly want to learn French? Well, she watched to Barbie and the 3 Musketeers in French in the car on the way back from Thanksgiving vacation. Don't ask me why. I know she sometimes watches her "Bella Let's Dance" DVD in the other languages. I guess she wants to be able to understand all the words. Plus, in ballet, most of the words are French. I said my only problem with that was that I don't know any French. I told her that in Jr. High and High School she could pick whatever language she wanted. She seemed happy with that possibility.