January 24 - 28th 2011

I can't believe how fast this month is going by. I finally feel like I'm back on track after the Christmas holidays. This week we've put in a good effort getting back in to the rhythm of home learning.


We've remained on Lesson 7 in MUS alpha/beta doing a page each day. Monday we will move on to Lesson 8 for both kids.

We completed the last chapter in Henry Huggins and LittleE is looking at the book on her own it's exciting to see her enthusiasm. Our new read-a-loud  is "Understood Betsy" by Dorothy Canfeild Fisher we've read up to chapter 3 and both children are enjoying it and doing some narration work for after each chapter. As well as going over some vocabulary and questions that are asked in the Sonlight curriculum package for the story.

Henry completed book one of ETC online. Shout out for the BigH! :-D LittleE has start book 11 in HOP but is still working on it. I notice that she is getting tired I'm thinking I'm going to be making her lessons shorter  maybe do two 10 min lessons daily. I'm not sure how that will work out. One day this week the kids decided to mix things up a bit and LittleE worked on ETC and BigH worked on HOP with me it was a fun change.

We've finished three lessons from Language Lessons FWTM: 13, 14, and 15. They focused on proper pronouns first, last and middle names and also we started a new poem to memorize.



'Work while you work'

Work while you work,

Play while you play,

This is the way

To be happy each day.

All that you do,

Do with your might,

Things done by half

Are never done right.

Author Unknown

And they also practiced printing their full names which if fairly challenging because the both have two middle names. They also spent some on their copy work from the poems they are working on, Who Can See The Wind & The Land of Counterpane as well as LittleE doing a page out HWT and BigH doing some work in his Kumon book. LittleE has shown quite an interest in writing notes to the lady next door. She'll recite to her father what she wants to say, he writes it down, she copies it into a card.  The neighbor lady has a new miniature puppy, we allowed LittleE to buy a little toy for the dog. LittleE neatly wrote out a little note in the card and went over for a visit to give it to her. It's very sweet. LittleE says Edna is her best friend. <3


Our art work is coming along nicely the kids worked on one of the activity sheets from How to Teach Children art. The children worked again today with mixing primary colours. BigH seemed to really enjoy his time painting and took his time and concentrated on his work. Our end of week project is using primary colours water colours to paint quilt designs. The children had to draw them out first before they painted then. I have to get my scanner hooked up to my computer once again so I can put up some of their beautiful work.

Started on week 6 of Sonlight's science the children worked on colouring in the Amazon Forest on their map of S. America as well as locating the Amazon river. We also worked on learning about the PH scale because we have been having some problems with our 20 gallon tropical fish tank (luckily I have a Biology 12 text book) we worked on PH levels and did some more PH tests and talked about the PH scale going from 0-14: and how 0 was very acidic, 14 was very base or alkaline, how 7 was equal parts acid and base and therefore neutral. We talked about how acidic things taste sour and base things tasted bitter. Both kids got a chance to perform a PH test of the water in the fish tank.

For history this week we completed chapter 9 in 'A Child's History of the World'. Which covered the peoples of Israel settlement in Egypt and how they came about and also how Rameses had ordered the killing of all the Israel's baby boys. We followed this up by later on reading from our DK Bible Exodus chapters one & two. We just love this Bible the historical notes and other items of interest enlighten our understanding of the places and people that lived so long ago before us. BigH looked up Egypt on a blank map (came with our Sonlight package) and wrote in the name of the country in. We also read Chapter 6 in Missionary With The Millars.

We've missed Spanish with Mr. Morales again... Trying to arrange for our Spanish lesson to be on a different day. Fridays are our fun days we go swimming our try to do some other field trip activity and work on art and read-a-louds. Had such a great day Friday with the kids and hubbie lucky me!

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.~1 Peter 4:8