Weekly Wrap Up–Back To School Edition

The girls and I have been working on some service projects the last little while.  On Saturday they both helped me work on a big shindig for The Forgotten Initiative.  It was definitely a learning experience in many ways, for all of us.

Our first day “back to school” was laid back, as you can see from the photos above.  When I got the camera out, the girls got all goofy.  So here is Lindsey being…Lindsey.  Olivia looks medicated (ok, she looks stoned) but that’s the result of too much time in the pool the day before.

Tuesday was dentist appointments.  No cavities, yippee!  Lindsey’s extra tooth has finally come through enough that we can schedule to get it pulled.  As of now we’re on track for September, unless the dentist gets a cancellation before that.

Wednesday we took the day off, yes in the middle of our first week!  We went to the summer $1 movies with friends and then went out for lunch.  We’ll chalk that day up to “socialization”…bwaahhaaa.

We also had swim lessons every evening this week.  Both girls have suddenly turned into little swimmers.   Although I still get queasy when I seen one of them in the deep water during class time.

Friday after class we headed back over to the Frontier Culture Museum.  First Fridays are free there, and we take advantage of the opportunity every chance we get.

Math:  Lindsey’s math was mostly review, which I expected, and had hoped for. Olivia’s math had a little review, but went directly into working with millions and equations.

Language Arts:  Again Lindsey is mostly still in review mode, and again I’m glad of that to help strengthen some areas.  Olivia’s curriculum has really been emphasizing sentence structure, so there has been a lot of writing going on this week.

Spelling:  Lindsey won’t start her spelling until next week.  Olivia is working through her first spelling and vocabulary list.   The words are much harder than what she is used to, so she’s having to work harder.

History:  We’re in the middle of a unit study on Vikings.  We should wrap up in the next week or so and then I’ll share a post about the unit study.  This week we worked on our lapbook and read about Leif the Lucky.

Critical Thinking:  This is an area that both girls need to work on, more so in Olivia than Lindsey.   So I’ve added books from The Critical Thinking Company to our daily work.  I picked Half N Half Animals level B1 for Olivia and level A1 for Lindsey.

Basically the book has a page with half of the drawing missing.  The child has to pay attention to details and draw the opposite side of the picture to match.  You can see examples here.   Olivia’s embellished sample is on the left below and Lindsey’s is on the right. 

We haven’t added Latin and science into our daily work yet.  That’ll come in another few weeks.

Although we made it through the week, it wasn’t all grins and giggles.  Olivia is a quirky learner.  I’ve noticed that if she is overly tired (not crazy tired, just more tired than usual) her brain turns to mush.   Seriously, she can’t comprehend the simplest of instructions, looks at me blankly and will put her words in an odd order.  Example:  “What the name of the boy is?”  I notice this is also an issue if she’s getting ill, or if she’s going through a grow spurt.  This has been one of those weeks.  I’m not sure if she’s still tired from last week at camp, or if the 2 hours of pool time in the evening are getting the best of her.  Perhaps a growth spurt is in the making?

Surely she isn’t the only child who does this, I hope.  Do any of you haven any experience with similar issues?   I’d love to get some input, suggestions or flat out help, so be sure and leave a comment or shoot me an email!

In the meanwhile visit the Weekly Wrap Up!