I like these Weekly Reports that many bloggers are doing, so I decided to try to do one for this blog. I haven’t been writing much on here but I miss the community when I’m away. So here goes — this is Week 14 in our homeschool but only my first week trying the report.
First of all, my three youngers are watching a Pokemon video while I type this. How sad is that? We have cut back on screen time for Advent but today was a bit of a chaotic day with lots of activity. Plus, we have a new laptop (ruby red) and my husband got a wireless LAN going today so I am typing beside the fire.
Here are charts showing our appointments for the week past and the progress charts for the “3Rs” subjects. You can see that we are staying roughly on track, but Logic is slipping. My mind obviously is telling me that formal logic isn’t quite as crucial as the rest of it.
Son, Sean, age 14
Son, Kieron, age 11
I have two other sons in grades kindergarten and special education grade 1, plus a daughter who is a senior in high school, but I’m just going to focus on the middle ones for now.
Here are the links to the individual days (honestly, I’m not expecting you to go look– but rather than write out all the little details here, it’s easier to just make the links):
Day 65
Day 66
Day 67
Day 68
Day 69
To sum it up, we got into the swing of Advent this week. Both the boys read several books to do with Bible history and the Incarnation. We tried to spend some extra time discussing doctrine and tradition and bringing out seasonal materials like this Advent Tree and a wreath.
The father of the household is involved in a new hobby — model railroad building — he spent some rebate $$$ to get some supplies. So we have a proto-railroad upstairs in the loft, which is big enough to absorb a 5 by 6 setup. To absorb it though, I did some furniture arranging and of course if you give a mom a furniture-rearranging imperative, she is going to want to vacuum out the corners and reorganize the toybox, too. Anyway, it’s been a household week, and you know, rearranging the house plus a new season of the liturgical and earth year add up to a certain glamor in the air. It makes us more excitable than usual. And oh, that’s right, a 5 year old’s birthday with all the associated cake and goodies will do that, too!
That’s it for this week. I think our especial area of progress was in including more writing in our homeschooling. We still do far more reading than writing, but writing is getting a bit more fluent and useful in our daily lives.
The weather is changing — it’s been unseasonably warm and bright recently, but now we are having rain, and snow is forecast for the near future in our corner of the California Sierras.
The Pokemon video just ended, so I think it’s time to close down. I start the new week tomorrow, not on Monday; I think it was JoVE at Tricotomania that asked why homeschoolers have to do normal school weeks, and it’s a good point. “Starting” on Friday lets me have a slightly different focus than when we “end” on Friday and start on Monday. Learning, of course, goes on all the time. I was going to try to write something about the informal learning that took place this week but this has gone on long enough already.
