Sunday, November 22, 2009

Weekly Report-Week 14

Ok, I'm alittle late in writing this, but by the time this weekend got here, I just crashed. I forgot how much fun it is to be pregnant (said with quite a bit of sarcasm). Be sure to check out others at the Weekly Wrap-up. We had a great week of school though, here's what we did...
Language Arts: Princess finished reading Viking Adventures and we started reading Castle Diary together. She continued to practice her cursive and phonics. However, we had a melt down over writing this week though. Princess felt that the dictation was too hard. Which lead into a nice discussion about how school is going to be challenging, that's how we learn. We disscussed the reasons I want her to learn dictation and how it will help her in the future. After she understood the purpose, she was willing to give it another go. We adjusted the way we are doing dictation to challenge her, but to still give her the confidence that she can do it. Let's hope that next week goes better.

Math: Princess passed her final exam for 2B this week! Some of the things she missed I wasn't completely surprised as we are working on them already. Others I was really surprised as they were things that I knew she had down cold. I'm thinking that she just got anxious because it was a test. So now I'm looking at adding a few more tests in to reduce her anxiety over them. If you've got a better suggestion, please leave a comment! I just don't want to send her off to college dreading having to take a test. I realize that we've got plenty of time before that, I'm just trying to be proactive :).

Science: We began studying constellations this week. The plan was to make a shoebox planetarium, but since I don't have a shoebox or index cards or a flashlight, we decided to make a book about them instead! Here's a look at that...
History: We started talking about medieval England this week. We learned all about nobles, serfs and castles. We made our own model of a castle, here's a picture, but you can also read more about it below.
All and all it was a great week for history!

Other: We completed our artist and composer studies this week. Our composer right now is Vivaldi and we have been having alot of fun listening to his Four Seasons Concerto. We also began reading Lamb's Tales version of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. So far, so good and I'm really glad that we are back to our Shakespeare studies! We didn't do art this week because I figured that our castle project was enough :).
Education of Me: I haven't been the best about keeping up with my reading this week, my brain just hasn't been able to handle it. Maybe next week will be better.

Hope you had a great week, thanks for reading about ours!

3 comments:

Sarah at SmallWorld said...

About test anxiety: I'm not sure how old your kids are, but my oldest had test anxiety--so I stopped giving tests. He never took any tests from 3rd-8th grade. In 8th grade he took a science class from a homeschool dad and took tests, doing fine. The first actual standardized test he took was the ACT--and he did fantastic! So, I wouldn't necessarily subscribe to the theory that taking tests at an early age will cure test anxiety. And if you wait to test in high school, they really will get it!

Rhonda said...

Paige: I remember all too well the complete fatigue I felt during pregnancy! There were times I wanted to lay down all day long (I couldn't, of course).
Bless you for getting so much done in spite of being so tired.
Maya does not like dictation either-we just started it. She much prefers copywork but we're consistently adding the dictation in.
Everything looks great as usual!!

Ritsumei said...

That castle is great! Have you seen Mr. McGroovy's Cardboard Rivets? They're soooo nice for that sort of project.

Also, I wanted to let you know that I got those fondant pictures I was talking about posted.