Term B, Week 1 Report

This is going to be short and devoid of photos. I'll do better for this coming week, though.

We had a good week. I was feeling pretty stressed about our current financial situation, so it was hard for me to be as "into" some of our activities, and therefore it didn't occur to me to take pictures. Also, Sprout was sick one day (Thursday) and the five days prior to that had not been sleeping well, so I was a bit out of the loop.

Some highlights: Noodle finished up the unit in MathUSee, so now she is ready to move on to subtraction. She did well in the subtraction that was started in the Primer, so I hope this won't be too big of a challenge for her. She took both her Chapter 17 test and her Unit Test (2 pages, 48 problems!) and aced them.

I told Spud that his attitude about getting his computer school done in the mornings would directly affect my attitude later that afternoon when he asked to watch cartoons. I also just told him he would be doing it first thing in the school day, since he seemed to just kind of mope around and stall because he didn't want to do it. Usually he enjoys it well enough once he gets going, but when he has all day to get himself in a bad attitude about it, it's that much less enjoyable. So, we laid those ground rules and it's been going better.

Both the kids filled up their sticker cards (Spud gets stickers for doing reading lessons/activities with me and Noodle gets hers for completing math pages & tests) and they got to pick a new little Neopets figurine. (The kids could care less about the Neopets part, they just like that they are cute. I picked up four sets at Shopko back in August that were on clearance, knowing the kids would think the little imaginary creatures were cute. Since each set has 3 figurines, it was a good value and the kids enjoy playing with their figurines together and anticipating earning the next one.)

For History we learned about Moses & the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Didn't really do anything special with it except read a story book about Miriam and baby Moses and color some pictures.

For Science we learned about mountains, and while it would have been awesome to go up into the mountains, we didn't. Our car is having a bit of an issue with coolant, so until we get that resolved, we're not making trips of any real length/intensity. Also, gas costs money, which we just don't have right now. We read a cool book, though, called Up On Denali that had a lot of interesting information about Denali (aka Mt. McKinley) in Alaska and mountains generally. The face of Denali is taller than the face of Everest, which I thought was cool. Personally, I think the face of a mountain is a more interesting measure of height than just the standard elevation. I'm interested in the amount of mountain, not so much in the amount of earth underneath the mountain!

I thought these pictures by the kids were pretty great.

Zebramobile, by Spud

Octopus School, by Noodle