Weekly Report: Week 9

This week we went to the doctor to check on Lydia's arm.  She's going to have to keep the splint on for at least another 2 weeks.  Luckily, she doesn't seem to mind it too much and it isn't really affecting her daily activities.  On Tuesday, we went to the lake and the girls had a lot of fun throwing rocks in. We did school every day this week except for Wednesday because we were out of the house the whole day.

In this picture, Ellie had already fallen into the lake twice.  Luckily just her pants got wet.

Looking for rocks.

Rock in mid-flight

 Math:
We did pages 1-4 in Essential Math B.  I can already tell that this is going to be much slower going.  Right now Lydia is struggling to understand the difference between less and more, and since most of the future lessons build on that concept, I'm trying to make sure she understands it before we move on.  So far we've used Cuisenaire rods and she is starting to understand that if a rod it taller than another, it is more, so I'm going to attempt to apply that concept to numbers.  I think I might also try to use a number line and show that if a number is to the right or left it is more or less.  We might be right here for a while, though.

We've also started counting to 100 with our new abacus every day, and then counting by 10s.  A week or two of doing this, and I think Lydia will have it down.

Reading:
We're continuing reading through my readers.  Lydia is getting better and faster, but she's still pretty slow, which is ok.  We're also doing Reading Bear every day, and she has actually gone farther in concepts with it than with OPGTR.  She understands about double letters and "ck".  I still want to make sure she gets a good grounding, though, so I'll continue to make sure she's read all the selections in OPGTR.  I don't mind teaching her concepts ahead of time as they come up though!

Memorization:
She has memorized the directions on a compass, and she's working on the 3rd Article of Faith.  She's doing well with her review every day.

Harvest Time:
We did the bread/Little Red Hen unit last week.  The girls enjoyed the book and I got a DVD from the library about how bread is made, from growing grains to baking.  We also made the yellow pound cake that is suggested in the plans.  The recipe uses the same ingredients from the Little Red Hen book we read.  I halved the recipe, and although the girls enjoyed it, I didn't like it.  That's probably a good thing because it would likely have killed me if I ate more than one slice (so much butter!).  Lydia and Eleanor did enjoy helping me measure and mix the batter, too.

Miscellaneous:
She did pages 16-20 in Color, Count and Cut.  Everything else is about the same.  We reviewed the Renoir prints and listened to our Debussy playlist.  I did get a children's book on impressionists that has a few Renoir paintings in it from the library, but we haven't read it yet.

And that was our simple week.  Next week we're going to take off because we have a wedding that is going to take up much of our time.  We may do school for a few days, but we'll see.