Week in Review 11/17/11

Hello! I know it has been awhile, but things got crazy here. Finally some time to sit down and update our blog. Nothing exciting to report as we are just in survival mode here, but we are now officially on Thanksgiving break and all is right in our world! I haven't done a week in review for a long time and I don't expect I will get these done every week either, but once in a while will have to do.  ; )

We are so thankful that we got caught up on all the school work and won't have to use Friday as a make-up day, but instead have an extra day of Thanksgiving break! The boys studied hard today! We have been studying roots in our Exploring Creation with Botany science program. I am really enjoying this lesson, I guess I like to dig in the dirt. We started some "rooting" experiments today and have leaves in a glass of water and will be watching for roots to grow over Thanksgiving break. We plan to get a leave from my mom's African Violet plant tomorrow to try rooting that too. If all goes well, the boys will have some plants to put into their room. We also went out this afternoon to dig around to look at roots. It was great as we also dumped out some container plants that were killed from the cold night we had last night. 

Tyler studied United Kingdom in history/geography this week. We really just worked on locating these countries on a globe and talked a lot about England. I plan to finish this tomorrow when we visit my mom and the boys can look at her scrapbook of her trip to the UK. (I know I said we were done with school for the week, but this will be fun and they won't know they are doing school.) We also read about being a knight and the patron Saint of England, St. George. We ending with a spot of tea and scones this afternoon. We will continue our study of Europe in December with another country, either France or Italy or maybe even Spain. We study one country a week, every other week.

Spelling went great this week. Caleb did a week of review from words he has missed on his spelling test. He only missed one and did awesome on dictation. I gave him rather long sentences and he kept the sentences in his head and only missed two words (out of 38). Tyler studied long e words spelled with a double e. He just missed one word and we only spent two days on it. He told me it was too easy! Caleb is using Spelling Plus and Tyler is using Wheeler's Spelling.

Math-U-See is going smoothly and the boys are progressing well. We are taking a break for normal grammar and have been reading Grammar-Land this month. They are enjoying it, but the book is very old and slightly out-of-date with some of the words that are used. We just don't use many of the words that are in this book. The boys were getting confused, so I decided to try something different. I discovered they enjoy learning this way, so I bought Sentence Family from Curr-Click and hope a modern story will go a little more smoothly. I think we are going to switch to MCT grammar next school year since this little experiment is going well. Our goal right now is just learning the parts of speech. This is new to Tyler, but mostly review for Caleb.

Our read aloud went out the window this past month. I completely forgot all about them! Maybe we will do some reading over break?? I say that on every break,and it never happens, but I will keep dreaming!

Some goals for our Thanksgiving break include writing out our lesson plans till Christmas. I need to find more books for Tyler to read as he goes through them so fast and he is a bit picky in what he likes to read. Any suggestions for a second grader that reads well? I also plan to get some Christmas shopping done and finish the wallpaper removal and painting of a bathroom.