Weekly Wrap-Up : The 1st Week After Christmas Break

We dug out the paints to work on our birdhouses... a 2nd coat!

After almost a full 3 weeks off of school work for Christmas, traveling, New Years and a few days of trying to get the house back together and some rest... none of were totally ready for school to start again last Monday.

but.we.did.

We pulled out the books and got to work;) And really once we got started it wasn't soo bad:) Since we really were just starting where we left off it didn't feel like we were starting all over again.

For Bible we discussed the Seeds Parable. I am always so impressed with the kids' thoughts with some of the questions we get to discuss each day. There were some days that our Bible times were really crazy, disruptive and basically dysfunctional:/ And I didn't handle some the situations with grace like wanted. But we got to have a very good conversation about the importance of studying/reading/memorizing the Bible!

In Math, we are in the thick of multiplication, division and fractions! As much as the kids (and I) are eager to just finish their work, I remember that these basic concepts are ones that I saw high school math students struggle with often, too often! So we will work until we "get it"!

For Language Arts, we jumped back into Grammar, spelling, reading and writing. We worked on thank you notes for our writing for the week (should be in the mail soon!!!). Spelling is just spelling:) LOL!! But I realized how close Chris and Lydia are to starting on another level... finishing a grade level of spelling in 1/2 a year:) Library books that the kids picked the previous week were their reading for the week, although by the end of the week the girls were reading Molly- American Girl books to correspond to our historical time period.

I haven't written much about Anna's (our) experience with Shurley English! I'll be honest and say that it's totally kicking our tails!! There is soo much work in one week that it makes it stressful and discouraging:/ So we tweaked it because we can!! Anna is doing the 5th grade level while she's in 4th grade so we decided to do a lesson every 2 weeks instead of every week!! So one week will be new concepts, practice, labeling sentences, etc! The following week is test taking and writing assignments (pre-writing, rough draft and final draft). Two days a week Anna completes a Daily Gram  to keep her practicing lots of different Grammar skills;) So far, so good;)

Our read alouds were Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin and When Hitler Took Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. Breaking Stalin's Nose was a very strange read because the main character is pro-Stalin throughout the book and he is soo brainwashed... it was hard to read. The ending was cool though and made it a "good" book. We started When Hitler Took Pink Rabbit right after and we all got "into"the book really quickly! We are looking forward to how the main character's family adapts as refugees.

As you can probably tell with the read alouds, in History we are starting WWII. This week was the rise of Hitler to power. Pretty scary stuff:/ We read, made some main point sentences to copy into our history notebooks.

And then there was Science:) We are loving the materials from Apologia Chemistry:) We read half of chapter 5 using outlines to pick out the important details during 2 days. And then Friday afternoon we had Lab Day... always fun:)

A quick experiment about "cleaning" metal with vinegar!

A few days later:/

Chris working hard getting it all down in his notebook;)

 

The first try didn't come out right (although we did redeem them later)!

So we tried again:)

Anna's expression was funny... she really wanted it to work, but it was soo sticky at first

Lydia's cheese smile! And she DID get her hair cut this week:)

The many faces of Chris:)

Lab Day, win!

I'll do a separate post for Nate... maybe:) But we've been working with Corduroy by Don Freeman last (and this) week. He LOVES the Before Five in a Row books:)

So I did it;) A wrap-up:)
Hope you all had a great first week back!!!