Our first week back to homeschooling after a break is always kind of weird. The second week goes better, and by the third week, we are back to our routine again full force.  Usually.  This time has been an exception.

Most of you know that we took the entire month of April off.  You can read more about our schedule on my Homeschooling page. We love our schedule, but this is our third week back and it just didn’t go so well.  This is my first Homeschool Weekly Wrap-Up too, in a very long time.

The weirdness of the week is that it has been raining off and on, and we have been in the garden off and on. I started coming down with a chest cold yesterday, and it’s full blown this morning. We haven’t been so good about starting school on time this week at all. Our starting time has been around 10am, which doesn’t make me too happy but is also probably my fault. Okay it’s definitely my fault. I need to figure out a daily/evening routine that includes time just for blogging. I need some balance. We have ignored our history reading, and today I’m not sure I CAN read aloud because of my cold and the way that I feel. I’m hoping I can find our book on Librivox, to do the reading for me today, or I will have the kids read aloud. I think overall we had a productive week, but I just feel like we slacked too much. (Or I slacked too much which just encourages the kids to do the same.)

On the other hand, this week, we have been working on improving sentences in our Shurley Grammar. We’re not using student books or practice workbooks this year, although we may next year. For this year, I am working with both boys together, using a whiteboard. It was really neat to see the ways they came up with to improve sentences!  We did get out the Thesaurus, and I had them look up the adjectives and adverbs from their sentences, to see if they could come up with some better ones.  They sure did!  We spent two whole days just improving sentences, and I think it was time well spent.  They have finally caught on to the question & answer flow of the program and can classify their sentences fairly easily now.  You have to realize that we took 2nd trimester OFF from grammar, so we are just getting back into it again.  They are doing well.

Math is going great. Both boys thrive on Math U See, and look forward to their math lessons. D2 is NOT enjoying estimating 4-digit numbers, but he can do it quite well so I’m not pushing it too much. He is nearly past that concept anyway. D1 is still memorizing multiplication tables, and they are FINALLY beginning to stick! Hooray! Lots of credit goes to One Hundred Sheep skip counting CD too, because that makes things SO much easier. We love it.

I had to make a change with D1’s spelling, which has been going VERY well.  We don’t have their special student notebook, but we are using a regular composition notebook and I only allow him to write on one side of the paper. When we reached the end of a word family series of lists (8 lists) he went back to the beginning of the notebook and began the next series on the blank side of the pages. This way he never gets to see what he worked on the day before, which the program emphasizes.  This didn’t work so well the last time we tried it… he just didn’t seem to get it… but this time we are enjoying Sequential Spelling.

Thank goodness we get a restart every Monday!

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