Smrt Lernins

Despite the broken arm (for which Captain Science will absolutely NOT have to have surgery, hooray hooray), we’ve had a reasonably productive week here at the McLernins household.

We went History Lite this week, with Captain Science just reading some books on Greece in preparation for our actual start of Greek history next week. He did chapters 4.11-4.15 and the chapter 4 review in Growing With Grammar, plus an online quiz over subject-verb agreement. With his arm prohibiting writing, we just took the writing-related subjects really easy this week. No actual writing unit at all, obviously.

Math was another story, however. We did a chapter of Life of Fred at least four days this week (I think we skipped Tuesday) and then did the ch. 1-15 bridge to move on to ch. 16. Because he has a harder time explaining how he comes to his answers (he can do the work in his head or he can do it on the paper, but trying to explain for the purpose of putting it on paper is confusing), we did bridges 1 and 2. He passed bridge 2 with absolutely no trouble. The only things we need to work on are a) making sure he answers with the correct terms, such as “greater than” instead of “bigger than” and b) remembering to give the final answer in the original form, such as remembering to say that 2/5 is smaller than 3/4, instead of saying 8/20 is smaller than 15/20.

I wasn’t actually present for this week’s science lab, as I went to IKEA to pick up our new school desk (we went with black/brown because the walnut effect looked cheap). Captain Science reported that he and Eclectic Girl made an electromagnet from a battery. We’re going back over to Patchfire’s house for a second lab (and to eat dinner and watch Dollhouse) this afternoon.

Overall, I’m pleased with the changes we’ve made to our curricula over the past 8 weeks and I feel really good about the directions in which we’re heading. I can’t wait to start using our new history book and get further into our writing curriculum.