Days of Wonder: A glass of wine would be nice about now . . .

We were about as close to a perfect homeschooling week as you can get, even factoring in the new baby girl we started watching this week. She is a darling. We got a lot of work done during her cat naps, but she also sat on my lap for a few lessons and sat in her bouncy seat and listened along with the boys as I read The Jungle Book. The boys took breaks from their work to hold her, play with her in her play gym, make funny faces at her to get her to smile, and keep her company while I went to the bathroom, etc. They were really a big help, and so sweet with the baby. One of them may have even volunteered to give her a bottle, but I vetoed that plan! I don't think they're ready for that quite yet. We accomplished a lot more than I thought we would this week. I think the challenges will come when the baby gets bigger and starts moving and wanting to get into things. We may have to do school during naps and evenings then. For now, we'll just keep going along and adjust as needed.

Maybe it was the novelty of the baby being here, but there was very little whining or complaining about school this week. They did their work and had good attitudes.

Now- the reason I could use a glass of wine is that after the baby left, I made them go up to clean their disaster area of a room. I had sent them up after school to start the cleaning, but a spider sighting sent them back down. So, when Baby went home, we all went upstairs. Apparently, they saved all their whining and complaining this week for the cleaning of the room. They were fighting, going into hysterics, blaming me for not having enough places to put their toys, etc. I was trying to ignore it and started in on re-organizing the bookshelf. After taking everything off the book shelf and yelling about only putting books and not Pokemon cards, Legos, Star Wars guys and the like on the book shelf, I moved on to Ed's desk. He was having a fit about the way I was cleaning the gigantic pile of crap on his desk, so I just lost it and swiped the whole pile onto the floor, which, of course, caused more hysterics- this time from both of them. Andrew told me to do the same to his desk if I wanted, so I did. They were in shock. They couldn't believe I actually did that. I'm not sure why they don't recognize when I'm serious about the room cleaning by now. I've been warning them all week that if they don't get the place cleaned up, the toys were all going back down the basement, and they were going to have to earn the stuff back again, like we did a few months ago. Last night, I refused to go in to tuck them in bed because I didn't want to kill myself tripping over the junk everywhere. I did our snuggle routine out in the hall. I need to get my act together and make them clean a little bit every evening, but I'm so exhausted by the time story time rolls around, I keep forgetting. Maybe next week . . .

Anyway, we have 3 weeks worth of schooling to sum up, so here goes:

Language Arts:

We've been practicing all the poems they know, but haven't started any new ones. They have been recognizing the elements of poetry that we have learned in other sources that we are reading for pleasure. They finished Frindle and have started Ribsy by Beverly Cleary for book club.

We took a break from spelling this week, but the prior two weeks were words with the root dis and words containing the long i sound spelled with -igh.

We've read a couple chapters in Sentence Island, covering the role of the subject and the predicate, direct objects, indirect objects and subject complements. We are learning about subject/verb agreement. They are doing more sentence analysis in Practice Island as well. We reviewed contractions and talked about synonyms with some paint chip ideas I found on Pinterest. They did a narration exercise from First Language Lessons. Here is Andrew's:

And here is one of Andrew's poems with his dis spelling words:

And one of Eddie's sentence analyses:

In cursive handwriting, we have learned up to capital G, and have been practicing everything we've learned.

We've finished listening to Inkheart, and are on disc 2 of Inkspell. This one is read by Brendan Fraser, and does not compare to Lynn Redgrave's brilliant performance. But, they still ask to drive around and listen, so I guess they're invested in the story.

Math:

We've been plowing through the Kumon Multiplication book and continue working in the Kumon Geometry and Measurement book, which so far has been a review of place value and identifying fractions. We've done a couple of pages in the Multiplication Mosaics book, too. Here's one of Ed's:

I have also given them a couple of multiple digit multiplication problems on the whiteboards so that when we go back to working on Math U See, it won't be too much of a shock.

History:

To finish up our study of Peter the Great, the boys designed their own cities, keeping in mind how Peter designed St. Petersburg. They really got into this project and we displayed their cities in the sunroom:

We learned about the Ottoman Turks and their desire to gain lands to the west and their attempt to tunnel under the walls of Vienna. We learned that Sultan Ahmet III was called the "Tulip King" because he brought back thousands and thousands of tulip bulbs from The Netherlands.

We learned about the Indian empire falling apart under Mohammad Shah and the English shopkeepers building forts and creating the East India Company to protect themselves during this unstable time in India. We learned about Siraj, the ruler of Bengal invading an English fort in Calcutta and locking the prisoners in a dungeon where lots of them died, thus earning it the name "The Black Hole of Calcutta". We read Exploration Into India by Anita Ganeri. We learned that when Aurengzeb wanted all of India to be Muslim, the leader of the Sikh religion formed an elite guard, called the Khalsa. We learned about the 5 K's of their attire- Kes, Kangha, Kirpan, Kara, and Kachcha , and dressed up like them.

Then we learned about the extent of the Chinese Empire at this same time period, and Emperor Chi'en-lung and his massive library.

Science:

We've been very busy in science these past few weeks. We had been learning about mixtures and solutions, and then we learned how scientists sometimes use special tools to un-mix ingredients in a mixture. We did an "un-mixing" experiment:

We did a Cupcake Chemistry project from Cool Chemistry Concoctions.

We then turned our cupcakes into Harry Potter cupcakes for our Harrathon the next day.

We learned about polymers. We learned about special polymers that our bodies use, like carbohydrates and proteins. We finally painted and put together the molecule model set that Eddie got for Christmas.

French:

We learned family words and made family trees:

We also reviewed household words and they played some of the games on the French in 10 mins. a Day CD-ROM.

Latin:

We learned quaque mane and quaque nocte.

Music:

They learned high D and started working on "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie".

Health:

We talked about foods containing calcium and how calcium helps your bones.

P.E.

Mostly, I've been sending them outside to play, since the weather has been so gorgeous. Need to work on some skills, though, since I'm not sure we'll be able to do any more Swim & Gym with the baby.

Art:

We did Lessons 13 & 14 in Artistic Pursuits. The first one was about line, so I had them try to draw the outline of an object. The second one was about color, so I had them draw with colors in their art journal and they had to tell me how the colors made them feel.

Some of the extras we've done:

Andrew and I made heart cookies for Valentine's Day.

We had a special Leap Day unit. First, we read information online about Leap Year and Leap Day. Then, we did a leap word search, a math maze where you had to count by 4s from 4 to 400 to get through, and we wrote letters to ourselves to open on the next leap day in 2016. They leapt in the air 29 times, then played Leap Frog across the living room (It was too wet to do it outside!).