Laura’s Imperfect Blog

Time to talk about what we did this week. It was a pretty productive week, considering we spent Mon and Tues at the hospital where my Dad is. 

Math: Life of Fred lessons 8 through 12. He’s doing really well with the math and confirming that he was ready for the Early Algebra book. He picked up a lot last year (I’m sure his teacher would be happy to hear that, she didn’t get much evidence of it at the time).

Grammar: Continued prepositions and touched on helping verbs and verb phrases with another 5 worksheets in Easy Grammar Plus. He’s got the prepositions down pretty well but didn’t get the verb phrases piece well. I was in class today so Anthony covered school today. He wasn’t ready for the grammar so Connor didn’t get the guidance he needed. We’ll be covering verb phrases again on Monday.

Bible reading: He made it to the Commandments in Exodus this week. 

Vocabulary: He completed Lesson 3 and we discussed missed items in Lesson 2. He’s doing pretty well with this. I need to find more ways to incorporate vocabulary in other things, there aren’t enough exercises in the workbook.

Writing: He did assignment 4 in the EIW Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons. I’m not expecting the Great American Novel from him. 

History: We started with the TRISMS series (it arrived Wednesday)!! For Unit 1 he has done the unit worksheet, Music (Jubal from Gen 4:21), Architecture (the ark), and started Art (cave paintings). Next week we’ll work on the map items for Geography, Science questions, and timeline, as well as discussing various flood stories for Literature. He’ll also do another Architecture worksheet on Çatal Höyük.

Free Reading: He finished another book this week! This is one his Dad got for him last weekend. He read Blood of the Heroes by Steve White. Seems to involve ancient Greek heroes so it fits in with our classical education schedule too! I plan to read it soon so I can see what he actually read. 

What are we missing? Haven’t gotten into General Science yet. We also haven’t started the Logic book. That is going to be very dependent on conversations and we just haven’t had time for that yet. We also haven’t come up with a good physical activity. We have equipment for him to work in the house, but he isn’t really taking that seriously yet. 

We will have another art option soon. A friend from my EMBA class is opening an art school where his wife will teach 2-14 year olds in varous art techniques. Snook Art has classes starting in October. I can take him Thursday as I head down to study group at Queens, and then Anthony can pick him up when class ends. 

Concerns: Typical beginnger concerns I’d say. Is he doing enough work. Am I spending enough time with him. 

Of course, while I’m writing this I’m watching video from weather.com about Hurricane Ike and I’m not sure if Galveston will be around after this weekend. Plus there was a run on gas around here today and some local gas stations are out of gas. Makes my concerns look small.

Life got busy last week. But here’s my weekly report.

Math – he completed 3 lessons in Life of Fred. I can’t tell if he’s liking it or not yet

Writing – he completed Assignment 3 in the IEW Ancient History writing.

Kingfisher – he read the 2 pages and wrote a short essay on cuneiform and one on ziggurats, along with a picture. His writing is pretty good. (I ordered TRISMS this week, we’ll see if that works better)

Vocabulary A – he finished lesson 2 and did very well this time. (He wasn’t really trying with lesson 1)

Grammar – he looked over the list of prepositions and wrote some sentences using them, this week we begin the Easy Grammar Plus workbook

Literature – he says he read Gilgamesh. We’ll go over that again this week

Free reading – he read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and enjoyed it. I explained to his dad that I would like to see him read more just to get the habit of reading and understand that you can start a book with words you don’t understand (either because it’s sci-fi, fantasy, or older) and lots of characters you don’t know and if you stick with it you will start to understand the words (either check a dictionary or use context) and know the characters. His dad asked if I meant the classics. I said “I’ll take care of the classics” I just want him to get some reading under his belt. So this weekend, his dad bought him a book. Pretty cool.

That’s in for now.

Whee, homework mostly done, study group went well. Work is through until tomorrow.

Let me catch up on my blogging while I can.

We started last week. I had a couple of plans through the summer. Start him right in and keep him busy so he doesn’t have time to play video games all day, but we’d finish all my material by January. Or start him slow and easy to “handle” the public school detox that people talk about (no idea what this looks like or how to handle it). Some even suggest doing something non-schooly on the first day to clearly state this homeschooling is different. Then Mom wanted to take him for the week after Labor Day so I decided we’d start easy and then I could easily control the school work he had to do while at Mom’s. That made for a slow and uneventful first week.

He did chapter 1 in Vocabulary, read the first 4 summary pages of Kingfisher, finished the first 2 writing assignments (poems with creative adjectives and verbs), and read most of Gen 1-20 with a family tree of Abraham thrown in. He also completed the first 3 lessons for Life of Fred Algebra (so far I know all the answers). He explored the Encyclopedia Britannica DVD and started creating his Timeline notebook. He also read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and figured out that the meaning of life is 42.

I am loving Homeschool Tracker Plus. At the beginning of the week I just print out his assignments for those 5 days. Then as he hands in homework and I grade it, I just enter in the total points and how many he got, and it figures up his grade for me.

Then Mom got a job (that’s cause for celebration)!

That means he’s here this week instead of there. Today was ‘kind’ of slow – he has way more work to do this week, but he just did the mental preparation for it. Evidence will appear tomorrow. Today and tomorrow he will correct his vocab and math homework from last week, he will do his 3rd writing assignment (a paragraph on Ziggurats), write a page on Gilgamesh (he read it today), do lessons 4-7 in Life of Fred, memorize the 50 prepositions in Easy Grammar, outline his Bible reading from last week and this week, and write 2 more essays on topics from pages 8-9 in Kingfisher (Sumer, etc., including ziggurats). Today he also read the Calliope issue that talked about that time period. He quickly detected the pattern of all the subject matter. He’ll notice I did just as much work when we move onto Egypt next

For free reading today he decided that A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was too hard for him (maybe we’ll read it out loud together), so I told him to pick up Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. He read 4 chapters of that and then headed off to play the game he got for his birthday.

That was fine since I had to get my own homework done. Tomorrow should be good.