Week in Review

It's time once again for the week in review.

I spent a lot of time this week working on next year. I am not sure what sparked the need to figure it all out...possibly because I realized that I don’t have it all figured out. My big issue right now is what history curriculum to use. Right now we are using Story of the World…which only goes through 4th grade. I had planned to move to History Odyssey for next year – I even bought the guide book. But after looking it over, and reading some discussion about it on the Well Trained Mind boards, I realized it might not work. What I like about SOTW is the activity guide and its discussion questions, map work, outlining/narration details, reading lists, projects and tests. HO does not have these things. There is a guide for the work to be done – but no discussion. Some reading lessons but no additional notes on those – it just does not seem meaty enough.

The next program that I looked at was Tapestry of Grace. It looks wonderful. It is a multi layered programs with appropriate reading/books/questions/projects for elementary, middle and high school. It looks like it provides an outstanding parental guide. However, I do not want a religious history program. I’d rather keep my religious instruction to church. Probably not a common approach…but it’s what works for us. TOG is also a pretty expensive program…but I am thinking that I would like to see it and see if I could use it in a secular manner – or maybe even combine it with HO.

Finally out of frustration, I pleaded my cause to the members of my e-group and got some great suggestions: Sonlight, Mystery of History and one I had never heard of: History at Our house. Now that last one looks so intriguing. I still have questions about it…but we’ll see. Homeschooling looks to be quite different around here next year – if we use HAOH, Katie will get a class via teleconference; and if we use IEW, her writing lessons will be on DVD.

MATH: Katie continued with multiplication and division of fractions by moving into multi-part word problems. Some of these were quite challenging to her (yippee…we found a math challenge!). Here is one for you to try: Mrs. Klein made some tarts. She sold 3/5 of them in the morning and ¼ of the remainder in the afternoon. If she sold 200 more tarts in the morning than in the afternoon, how many tarts did she make?

HISOTRY: We started the week with a test on Chapter 23 (the chapters we covered last week). She finished reading “The Night Journey” by Kathryn Lasky and “Stalin” by David Downing. She had to choose one to write a book report – and she chose “The Night Journey” saying that doing it on “Stalin” would be too easy! Below is her report – kind of hard to read with the pencil and the reflection from the scanner. Next week we’ll try pen!

Next she started Chapter 24 and read about Mussolini (Il Duce – and we talked about the Latin root for his nickname) and Fascism in Italy. Today she is going to start “The Wave” by Todd Strasser.

PHYSICS: Katie continued with week 24 of the Noeo Physics curriculum and learning about Magnetism. She learned about magnetic fields (am I the only one that reads this and thinks about the tv series, LOST?!!) and how to make a non-magnetic object magnetic. I hadn’t realized that was possible!

SPELLING/GRAMMAR: In Grammar, Katie worked on proper adjectives and adjectives used to compare; in Spelling, she continued working with suffixes.

WRITING: This week Katie had to take the floor plan she made of our house and write a written description of it in a five paragraph essay form.

PIANO: Katie is working on sheet music, doing a practice piece from the technique book and reviewing scales this week.

OTHER STUFF: Our homeschool group is still on break so there was no Latin or Folk dancing – but it will start again next Thursday. Yesterday, Katie went to the “America’s Got Talent” audition at the Cobb Energy Theatre. She was gone for 7 hours! Her friend “Squirtle’s” mom’s marching band (Seed and Feed Abominables) were auditioning. Katie is under strict instructions to not reveal who is going forward…so I have no idea if they are “Going to Vegas” or not…But I hear that Katie might be shown on camera with her antics in the audience. I guess I’ll have to watch now!