Weekly Wrap Up - Maine

If any of you ever have a really sick child, with an extremely high fever and you want to see drastic, IMMEDIATE improvement, take them to the doctor and pay the co-pay.  You don’t even need to SEE the DOCTOR…just pay the co-pay.  Fevers will diminish, puking will halt and coughing will cease.   Guess how I know THAT???

So, aside from the 104-105 fever for 4 straight days, we still managed to get a lot accomplished.  In my defense, I’d planned on letting the sick one skip her lessons, but she didn’t want to, go figure.

Geography/History:  We visited Maine this week, via books and the movie “Keeping the Promise” starring Keith Carradine and Annette O’Toole.   We also had some lovely Maine travel guides to look through and cut up for a state collage for our notebooks.   Did you know that there is a 1700 pound, life size chocolate moose in Maine?  No extra charge for that tidbit of info.

Our famous person was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  So in addition to our usual items, we included poetry writing and illustrating.

The Coast of Maine Book; by Nancy English
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America’s Beloved Poet; by Bonnie L. Lukes
Poetry for Young People, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; edited by Frances Schoonmaker
Hiawatha; by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; illustrated by Susan Jeffers
The Children’s Hour; by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Baby Lobster Grows Up; by Katie Marsico
The Lobster: It’s Life Cycle; by Herb Taylor
Lobsters; by Jody Sullivan Rake
Prairie Dogs Kiss and Lobsters Wave “How Animals Say Hello”;by Marilyn Singer

Latin:  This was a built in review week.  We reviewed the chapters on body parts and foods.   At the end of the week we worked on ALL of the songs we’ve learned…eesh.

Language Arts:  State of being verbs was the main topic this week.  We also reviewed all of our poems from year 1 and worked on final memorization of “The Goops”.

Science:   We had two separate lessons this week.  The first was food chains.   Did you know that it takes 214 animals (mostly LARGE animals) to feed a pride of 5 lions for 1 year.   What’s more amazing is that they only spend 1 hour a day eating, 1.5 hours walking and the remaining 21.5 hours resting.   Then we hit the topic that every mom cringes over…reproduction.   At least, for now, it was animal reproduction so for a little while longer I’ve dodged the “talk”.

Math:   Olivia moved on to the 4 times tables and making change.  The times tables are going well.  The first part of the week was rough with the change topic.   I had to reword and reword and reword the topic before she could get a handle on it.   Lindsey entered the world of county by 2’s and subtracting by 1’s.

Spelling:  Olivia finished up lesson 23 of Level 2 in All About Spelling.  We’re almost finished this one for the year!

Reading:  Lindsey’s reading is getting much more fluent.  This week she learned the special sounds of “thr”.   Her reading has drastically improved this last week.  She’s even been reading out loud from the Bible…not an easy task for anyone when you’re in the book of Numbers, so I moved her up to the New Testament.

Awana:  Olivia was still sick on Wednesday, so she missed the her first night of Awana in FIVE years.  Lindsey is working through her book a second time now.

Piano:  Ditto on missing her lesson this week.  She still practiced along each day, but enthusiasm was greatly lacking.

I guess that’s it in a nutshell.   Nothing overly fru-fru or creative this week.   Visit the Weekly Wrap Up for updates on everyone else’s week.