Weekly Wrap-up--May 27, 2011

Without pictures and only a few links, again. I likely won't get to blogging until next week again though, so I thought I should do the weekly wrap while I was thinking about it.

We went camping on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The weather was less than ideal. It rained every day, and was so wet there was no place to set up a chair in our site that wasn't under a half inch of water. We had a great time, though! It was our first camping trip with the camper we bought in November. We love it. It is perfect for our family. It makes camping so much more pleasurable to have something that just fits for us!

Monday was a good school day. We got through what we needed to and got to spend the evening with good friends. Our friend A and her son M are spending the summer in Ireland (her husband is there on business) and (jealous? just a bit!), so we got together with 3 other families and had a surprise dinner with them. They were surprised, but before they got to us. The row of minivans out front gave us away!

We went geocaching with our homeschool friends on Tuesday. We searched for three caches, but only found one. One was too wet to find and the other we searched for, but couldn't find. I want to go back now, though. I looked it up at geocaching.com, and I think we might not have looked hard enough...

We had dentist appointments on Wednesday, which ate up a good chunk of the morning. We went for a walk when we got home, though the wind was a little cool! We finished all of our school work in the afternoon, though we usually try to get it done in the morning because by afternoon everyone is tired! We managed, though. For dinner, we had a Celtic feast of roast chicken, bread (without butter), berries and grape juice to go along with our study of the Celts and the Romans in Story of the World Vol. 1 Chapter 40. Kiddo and Kutey narrated what they have been learning for Daddy. I was quite impressed with the amount they remembered!

Thursday we attended a performance of Pinkalicious at Stages Theatre in Hopkins. Yes, Pinkalicious, like the book. Kutey loves pink. She enjoys the story of Pinkalicious. Daddy got to go with us, and we had fun! We finished school work in the afternoon, learned more about echinoderms in Real Science Odyssey-Life, then hit the park with some friends. The weather was too beautiful to pass up! In the evening, Kiddo and Kutey built an ice cream shop where Daddy and I ate our fill. YUM! All the talk about ice cream resulted in a trip to the store for some real ice cream. Double YUM!

Today, Friday, we have been working through some school stuff, cleaning out the van so Daddy can take it to get new tires, reading, reading, reading about all sorts of fun things (including echinoderms and jellyfish, along with the entire pink book collection--I'll post about that another time!) We are also preparing for a birthday this weekend!

Curriculum wise:

• Kiddo is pushing through mental math. He much prefers writing the problems out, but he is working through it with few complaints.
• Kiddo is nearing completion of Explode the Code book 7. We slowed down a bit, though. He is only doing half the lesson at a time. He was getting overwhelmed. ETC has always been something he liked, but this book adds a few different activities that are great, but take a bit more time, like reading comprehension activities. I decided it would be better to have him still enjoy it, so we cut the lessons in half. That is going better.
• We read Chapter 40 "Rome Begins to Weaken" in Story of the World, Vol. 1. We had a Celtic feast to go along with the study. We are planning to do a finding North, South, East, and West activity as well, but we need to have a sunny morning where we have no where to be! That hasn't happened yet.
• We wrapped up our study of Echinoderms (Unit 15) in Real Science Odyssey--Life. We did a lab where we made different echinoderm shapes out of a banana peel. Super fun, and memorable!
• Kutey has been working through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. She is doing great! It is so interesting to see how differently my two kids learn! We also did a few math activities (thing I wrote on the white board).
• Kutey has been playing a Dr. Seuss game on the computer, also. It has three levels, pre-k to 1. She whizzed through the pre-k stuff and has had no trouble with the Kindergarten stuff. I'm anxious to see how she does with the first grade stuff.

We are linking up to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. Click to see what others did this week!