Smrt Lernins

This week in Lernins History, we hit the 60 day mark! Captain Science declared that to be 1/3 of our 180 days school year, or 33.3%, or .33. I can’t believe we’ve already gotten that far! We’ll easily hit 90 days by Christmas, at this rate. So exciting!

Captain Science completed tries 3-5 for the bridge to chapter 25 in Life of Fred: Fractions and did some additional practice with adding and multiplying mixed numbers using worksheets from Math Drills. On Monday, we’ll move on w/ Fred, now that he’s cemented these concepts.

In Vocabulary from Classical Roots, he completed lesson 4, which is a review of lessons 1-3. I’ll quiz him on his roots and words next week. We continued with our once-a-week grammar schedule, due to additional subjects we’ve added. The Captain continued adverbs in Growing With Grammar, covering chapters 6.4 (adverbs that compare), 6.5 (building sentences with adverbs), and 6.6 (double negatives). In Writing Strands, he continued working on “sentence and paragraph control,” completing days 5 and 6 of that lesson. He still enjoys the writing program and I’m so glad I decided to ditch IEW! Still no forward movement on getting that theory book to start handwriting, much to my shame, but his handwriting has been consistently better lately. Captain Science also passed Dance Mat Typing level 1 with flying colors and will start level 2 today.

Captain Science and Eclectic Girl completed their Science in a Nutshell sound vibrations unit. Because they finished all three sections on Thursday, while Patchfire only expected them to finish two, there’s no science lesson planned for today (Friday), which works out really well, as Eclectic Girl has come down with a bad cold and probably isn’t up for company tonight.

We’re now past our halfway point with Ancient Greece. Next week it will be math, science, and culture; the week after, we’ll do mythology for our ongoing pantheon project we began with Ancient Egypt. This week, however, it was the Greek expansion through Asia, the birth of democracy, and how myth became history, all from History: The Definitive Visual Guide. Captain Science wrote about the destruction of Alexander’s empire and about Greek histories. We did transition back to hand-written essays, because he was spacing out at the computer and not doing quality work. He has almost finished The Golden Fleece and I have decided to let him read one of the adult translations of The Iliad, just to see if he can do it (he was asking).

The biggest news this week is that we’ve finally gotten Logic Countdown and are integrating logic into our week. He started with logical comparisons, describing why items are grouped and adding additional items to a grouping. My favorite example was “wheat, rice, barley___.” He correctly labeled them as grains, and then added flax of all things as his additional example. Can’t add oats like a normal kid, right? Logic is currently his “reward” for making it through his other assignments in a timely manner.

The Tank had his harvest festival at preschool, the notes about which I apparently ignored, as I showed up at school with him a half hour too early AND not dressed for me to stay. We had to come home so I could replace my pajamas with real person clothes. Have I mentioned how much I dislike having to take him someplace three days a week? Yeah, not a fan. Tank, however, loves it and loves his pre-K teachers, Miss Amy and Miss Carin, who seem to equally adore him. They like to ask him what’s bothering him, because he always answers, “Nut’in,” and they think that’s cute. We did a mini pumpkin hunt and The Tank rode on a small train around the building. He brought home all manner of strange items — paintings done with gauze and a bag of scooped-out pumpkin guts. His newsletter for November says, much to my chagrin, that they will be doing lots of “Indian projects” for the letter I and to celebrate Thanksgiving. *shudder* They mean well, but oh my stars. Time to break out a mini-unit on Whitey Oppressor the Pilgrim, right? Maybe we’ll talk about King Phillip’s War.

Babypie impressed us all this week by standing unassisted…at 7 months. Yes, I’m less than thrilled by this sudden leap forward from babyhood. Luckily, it surprised her as much as it did me, and she plunked onto her bottom. I think Patchfire’s Purple Child is a bad influence. That age-mixing just won’t do! She’s still crawling up a storm, cruising around furniture, and being cute as can be. Officer Daddyman and I swear we heard her say “Dadaman” this week after hearing me say it (she’s been addressing him as “dada” for a couple of weeks now). She waves to her reflection frantically and chants “Hi! Hi! Hi!” every time we pass a mirror.

Officer Daddyman had some good arrests this week and is thinking about where he’d like his career to go from here. It’s time for a bit of a change, so maybe he can move to another unit. DUI looks promising — though it would be brutal hours, I’d be very proud of the work he’d be doing. He’s also trying to start back to college in either spring or summer, so we’ll be extra busy with our lernins!

As for me, I’ve almost finished reading A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome. Have I mentioned that history SURE IS INTERESTING? I’ll elaborate later. Other than that, I’ve been knitting, sewing, and planning a BOLD Red Tent with Patchfire and some other friends (who don’t have blog nicknames yet).