Adventures in Mama-Land

Yes, we really DID do school this week.  In fact, because we were still in the break between Parks & Rec 9-week sessions, we probably did MORE school than we usually do, and certainly more than we will accomplish next week. However… I mentioned that I’ve been sick and miserable;  I actually woke up voiceless on Tuesday and wasn’t able to speak at all until Friday morning.  So our emphasis this week was on subjects that teach themselves, anything that comes in audiobook form, and anything I could teach in a whisper. A couple of highlights: LATIN!  The kids are both loving our Song School Latin program.  We’re in Week 6, and so far, this program is so light it doesn’t really feel like school.  They both beg to do more than one song a week, but I figure we’ll pace ourselves and it’s great keeping it light and easy.     Here they are singing this week’s song with the help of these puppets.  The puppets are in the back of the book, but ...

A quick update, for a short Friday!  Here’s a bit of what we did this week: We used the “shevatim” (twelve tribes) dodecahedron die , though we didn’t play the game I made up to go along with it. Despite my being out most of yesterday and a couple of other truncated days here and there, this was a week of finishing up and getting ready to start fresh ! We finished up a brief math break between JUMP Math levels 1 and 2 – we’ve finished most of the sheets in Miquon Orange during this time, and Naomi actually asked to move on.  She’s very excited about starting fresh with JUMP 2.1 next week.  Still not sure how much of the first pages we’ll do – there’s about 20 pages of review at the beginning of the book, and since we just finished the last one a few weeks ago, we don’t really need the review… Here she is, telling time with Miquon.  Her time skills are WAY out of line with where she is with the rest of her math.  She gets confused by the numbers every which...

  Still not quite back to normal, but thanks to starting on Sunday last week, we actually fit in 4.5 schoolish kind of days… We’re “between” math books – finished JUMP Grade 1, but I thought it would be a fun change of pace to finish the Miquon Orange book before jumping into the Grade 2 books.  Naomi seems to be enjoying the freedom of choosing her own worksheets, though it jumps around a bit.  She enjoys the “make up your own problems” even if she sometimes doesn’t understand what sort of thing she’s supposed to make up.  Here’s one she did for me deliberately… she loves these little “circle equations!” I have also added in regular “math out loud” lessons from The (poorly-named) Verbal Math Lesson .  As with Miquon, Naomi Rivka is really enjoying the challenge of doing something quite different from what we’re used to!  The book offers a nice mix  of straight arithmetic and word problems.  Most of the word problems are easy for her, but every...