Weekly Wrap-Up, March 25

03.25.2011 | 4:50 pm | Homeschooling

Just a regular week, mostly, thank goodness! A couple of doctor’s appointments crammed in with all the schoolwork, but we worked around them. For instance, while I was getting my blood drawn on Tuesday morning, G sat outside in the grass & shade outside the medical park while P gave him his math & memory tests, and while D played nearby. Homeschoolers just make things work.

This week in math, G learned to divide by fours, which is easy once a child knows how to multiply by fours. He also learned the concept of estimation, which allows him to quickly add large numbers in his head and get an estimated sum to work with.

In language, we’re wrapping up our unit on nouns & verbs, with lots of review work.
For his reading, G worked on his second Henry Huggins book most of the week. Otherwise, he’s still doing a lot of reading in both his real Bible and also in his Picture Bible. He’s been toting the Picture Bible around with him all week, reading intently. I totally understand.

History lessons were fun this week, as we branched out into the world a bit and studied Pythagorus, Confucius, and then Kings Belshazzar and Cyrus the Great. In studying Confucius, G learned that our elders are to be honored and respected, and decided to write a note to Gram, telling her he loved her and her quilts (something he appreciated about her). It was a nice little activity for him and I’m glad it came up in our lesson.

Writing With Ease was the usual. He summarized excerpts and practiced dictation. Stories read from were The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks and The Elephant’s Child. We both enjoyed these two excerpts. G actually complained at the end of the first one, because he wanted to know what happened after the excerpt ended—guess we’ll have to track down that book and hopefully find it at the library!

G is still spending a lot of time drawing & sketching in that big sketchbook I mentioned last week. His drawings are still cracking me up; he is so creative and funny!

I spent most mornings outside this week, working on getting my plants pruned for the season, and doing some yardwork and planting. I planted 2 crape myrtles and an orange tree. I also did a lot of weeding in the yard; we have a yardful of weeds every spring, and I get rid of them the old-fashioned way (no poison): I pull them up by the roots. I had the boys come outside with me, and G was my pick-up man. I pulled weeds, and he carried a 5-gallon bucket, putting all the discarded weeds into it and then dumping it out into the woods whenever we filled it up. It’s great character-building for him (learning to work hard), and it was nice to be outside in the cool, fresh spring air together each morning! We finished up at lunchtime each day, and then went inside to eat and do our schoolwork. Again, homeschoolers just make schedules work with our needs—all while being with our kids throughout each day. We’re blessed beyond measure in choosing this lifestyle.

G made an exciting discovery this week. Back before Christmas, he’d gathered up acorns and planted quite a few of them out in the far end of the back yard, near his swingset. He was sure he’d get oak trees in return for his hard work. I wasn’t as optimistic. Who was right? Well, there are now quite a few tiny little oaks sprouting down there! He is over the moon about it. You can even see little half-acorns under the dirt, from where the tiny oaks sprouted.

In other news, I’m in the middle of a neat project that I came up with for displaying the boys’ art and schoolwork in our dining/homeschool area. I hope to be finished with it this weekend and will be sure to post pics in the next update.

In closing, I’ll share a picture of our Wisteria tree with this year’s blooms. It is flourishing more than it ever has, which is cool since we transplanted it from our old yard, when we moved into this house two years ago. For those who don’t know, it’s the boys’ very own bush, and it’s a placenta tree. It’s buried over D’s placenta, as well as the placenta & body of the little 11-weeks’ gestation baby we lost in November ’06. It is also G’s tree, because it was first planted in our old yard in March 2003, just as G was conceived. I have no doubt that the placentas are part of the reason the bush has grown and bloomed better than ever since we planted it over them.