Week #5 In Review

Well...another week of Evergreen Eclectic Academy's inaugural year has come and gone. Here's the summary:

LANGUAGE ARTS: We plowed through Section F of SWR this week. To add some excitement to our spelling--not that spelling isn't exciting enough on its own--I added a crossword puzzle, word search, as well as a couple of silly sentences for dictation (& illustration, of course).


Moving on to FLL...or should I say moving on from FLL??? I'm torn. I really, really like the concept of FLL. It uses a slow, gentle pace (think of the snail in the Frog & Toad story "The Letter") with repetition...LOTS of repetition. LOTS & LOTS of repetition. LOTS & LOTS & LOTS of repetition. You get the idea. I'm just not sure this is our cup o' tea. I originally started the year with the idea of covering the entire book quickly. Now I may just skip ahead to the 2nd half of the book or abandon FLL entirely. I just can't decide. So...for this week anyway...we just focused on identifying the nouns in our copywork passage.

READING: We finished reading aloud Little House in the Big Woods, and began reading Bridge to Terabithia. Grace has seen the movie and wanted to read the novel, so I let this read-aloud be *her* choice. So far it's going well, although I am doing a bit of {beep} censoring on some of the {beep} language. Maybe I'm turning into an old fuddy-duddy, but I'm just not ready to explain the meaning of "b*tch*ng" to my 7yo daughter.

More Frog & Toad for Grace's independent reading. This week's selection: Days with Frog and Toad. For all my fellow procrastinators, I highly recommend "Tomorrow." No hurry...just whenever you get around to it. :)

MATH: We're cruising along in Horizons 2. We completed Lessons 9-12, including our first "test." We're still playing "Go to the Dump" and working on those completing-the-ten addition facts. Multi-digit addition appears to be Grace's friend. I'm so happy!

CHARACTER: House rule #5--exhibit patience & self-control. Favorite fable: "The Crow and the Pitcher."



HISTORY & SCIENCE: We were having so much fun on the earliest writings (from SOTW1 last week) that we extended our study of it into this week. The girls each made their own cuneiform using Sculpey Clay. Now, I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to work with Sculpey Clay, so you may (or may not) be able to appreciate this next little gem. While *patiently* working to get the Sculpey Clay {ahem} "sculpt"-able...yeah, I know it's not a real word, but I love a bad pun...Grace made the observation that "little by little...does...the...trick!" I loved seeing the light bulb go off in her head as she made the connection to our earlier discussion of "The Crow and the Pitcher." So we managed to get the cuneiforms sculpted, carved and baked. Next step: painting! Then photos to follow.

Another afternoon I read about the Rosetta Stone from The Mystery of the Hieroglyphs, as the girls stamped with a hieroglyph kit I found at B&N. We also read some of Ms. Frizzle's Adventures: Ancient Egypt and caught up on map work & coloring pages from SOTW1, Chapters 2-3.

Our science "creature of the week" was the spider. We scored several great library finds on this subject. One of our long-time favorite tales to "spin" (yes, another bad pun intended) is The Spider and the Fly by Tony DiTerlizzi (based on a tale by Mary Howitt). If you're looking for something a little creepy--with a message--for some Halloween reading, be sure to check this one out!



SPANISH: Our new venture this week was Spanish. I originally planned to use ¡El Español Facil! Level 1 as our spine. Then along came the Homeschool Buyers Co-op with a group buy on Discovery Education's UnitedStreaming (which is still available, by the way...check it out here)...so we're using Elementary Spanish via UnitedStreaming as our main program with lots of supplementary materials. Stay tuned for a post on un plan Español ecléctico...coming soon to a blog near you.

OTHER: We are still listening to Rimsky-Korsakov and studying da Vinci. Grace also did a few GeeArt lessons on the computer this week. Co-op is continuing to go well. We even had a break from the rain this week to get out & do a little informal "nature study" at our local lake. We spotted tons of spider webs...some even occupied.

Well...that about wraps things up for this week. Thanks for listening! ¡Adiós!