Week in review 5/10-5/14

I think I've rambled enough about math this week so I'll leave that alone.

James used Apologia's botany book this year and then moved onto the Prentice Hall Explorer series book on plants with study guide. He wrapped that up this week. The plan was to grow a garden this summer at Mom's, but that has been set aside since I'm a little overwhelmed right now with a certain adorable little guy. Instead I picked up Apologia's first zoology book for him to read over the summer. I am not requiring any written work and I told him to let me know if he needs anything for any projects in the book that strike his fancy.

We're studying ancient Rome, which he is enjoying, but it hasn't captured his interest in quite the same way the Greeks did. We've been continuing our pattern of written narrations from the K12 Human Odyssey book, outlining the Kingfisher history encyclopedia, and reading historical fiction with the occasional book report. This week he read The Silver Branch by Rosemary Sutcliff. We also have a couple of Nova DVDs from Netflix titled Secrets of the Lost Empires. We were reading Coolidge's Caesar's Gallic Wars, but it was a real flop. His eyes were glazing over and so I let him drop it.

I'm not sure if I've raved on here about Rod and Staff's English program, but it is a huge hit. Who'd have thought a black and white, non consumable, Mennonite textbook would be one of our favorites, but it is clear and to the point and an excellent follow up to the First Language Lessons books we had used since 1st grade. We won't finish the 5th grade book this year, but I'm not going to worry about it since it only really teaches grammar up to the 8th grade book and a lot of people use that in high school.

I am working on a summer reading list. Ill post it when I finish.


Sean is on lesson 20 or so in 100 Easy Lessons. Each lesson is short enough to hold his attention span. I keep waiting for it to get too hard for him because I really didn't think he was ready when he insisted that I teach him to read, but he is doing a good job with it and we keep plugging along.

I had to pick up the More Let's Sticker and Paste book. He finished the first one this week. I love all of the Kumon books, but I have set aside the folding one for now; I think it is too frustrating for him. He'll be finishing the coloring book soon as well, and he is finally starting to at least attempt to color the space and stay in the lines, a marked improvement. His pencil grip leaves much to be desired, but it is slowly improving.

All in all, it's been a productive week. Chris is starting to take semi-regular naps and that makes it a lot easier to get lessons completed. It is only going to get trickier as he starts to grab at the papers in front of me.