Friday- Week in Review

Yeah, I haven’t posted a week-in-review since before Christmas. This is partially due to the blahs that I go into this time during the school year and partially due to needing to begin the college search and application process with my second ds, Grayson. So, what have we been doing and where are we now?

I spent Christmas looking at schools/ tutorials for my youngest. I was a little panicked about Grayson and was feeling like I needed to free up some time to work with him. We ended up visiting and enrolling my youngest in Classical Conversations- Foundations. I was looking for next year, but my little man loved it. They didn't have space for my extra student, but she will now be following some of the Foundation material as well.

Anyway, back to our week. We picked up Foundations in Cycle 2 week 12. Our group meets on Tuesday. On Tuesday afternoons I have my extra student Mei and review the material from that morning for her benefit. Duncan has a fabulous tutor and I like to see how she covered the material and reinforce that at home.

I have decided to introduce new Foundations material on Thursdays. I do this on Thursday, because Mei is here and I want her here on the day I introduce the new material. Yesterday, I introduced week 16.

Our director gave me the list of the Kingfisher 1999 pages that coordinate with our history statement and I cover these. I have been using the Usborne Internet-Linked Science Encyclopedia to go over the science memory statement, but I think that I will use something else next year. (This is just the science encyclopedia that I had on my shelf.) Right now we are on the art history portion of the arts rotation, so we look at the artist that will be covered on Tuesday. I also go over the rest of the memory work.

Either before Mei arrives on Thursday or after she leaves I discuss with Duncan his presentation for the upcoming week. I have not been doing very structured composition lessons with Duncan, so now I am doing a lot of modeling of IEW methods to prepare for the presentations. However, as next week he is just needs to read a favorite passage from the Bible, we haven’t had to do keyword outline or anything like that.

For those who don’t know- My dh was raised Muslim. I was raised Christian. I am completely aware that CC is a Protestant organization. Anyway, Duncan is going to read excerpts from the NIV Bible’s story of Noah in Genesis. Noah happens to be one of dh’s favorite prophets and he was the one who chose this passage.

We review memory work, blob maps, and other CC stuff the rest of the week. Currently this is taking some time, because the little man wants to memorize everything he missed first semester. He is not doing the Veritas Press timeline (I don’t want to spend the money on all those cards right now.) and I see no point in going back to do the Latin as they repeat the same material second semester. Duncan would love to do this too, but there are only so many hours in the day and if he wants to do this he will need to do it independently.

He is almost caught up in everything else except geography. I can’t tolerate memorization out of context. History and geography are taking some time, because I am not giving him new memory work until he understands the material. And argh doing it this way is not ideal. I have no idea how much he will retain.

OTOH- Duncan really wants to be able to compete in the weekly reviews. There is also a quarterly jeopardy type game where our entire CC group is divided into 4 teams that compete. We watched this when we visited and Duncan thought it was fabulous.

In addition to CC Foundations we are continuing with our own math and language arts. This week Duncan completed Key to Algebra Book 2, worked in the geometry section of the Complete Book of Algebra and Geometry, and did some Kumon. Mei worked in Saxon 65. Duncan, Mei, and I are continuing to read MCT’s Sentence Island together. We will be finished soon, but I may read through it again. They were missing things that I thought they should know, so I decided to back up in both Practice Island with Duncan and Winston Grammar with Mei. Duncan is still working through Plaid Phonics C and this week Mei started ElizabethB’s phonics lessons. Duncan also practiced violin.

This is long and without exciting pictures, but I think it gets me caught up.