Posted in Curriculum

I am going to try to do a weekly update from now on. After all, that was one of the reasons I created this blog!  I was hoping to do it on Sunday but I am a little late this week.  We have been going from sickness to sickness to sickness lately.  Right now it is stomach flu...  DH got it last Wednesday night and was down for the count at the end of the week.  I kept hoping it was food poisoning, but it wasn't.  Not two minutes after I lit Shabbos candles on Friday night, the baby started throwing up.  Sunday afternoon, both girls started within 30 minutes of each other.  Now today, Dante started.  I am the only one left standing...  But I am holding strong and praying fervently that I don't get it.  Isn't there a rule some place that mom's can't get sick??

Then when you top it off with the foot of snow we got today, well let's just say it hasn't been the easiest of weeks.

For the most part last week was pretty good.  We began our Renaissance Unit and all in all it was a nice quiet week.

So here is a general overview of our week for Little Miss (3rd Grade - age 8) and Sweetie Pie (2nd Grade - age 6):

History -Done all together:
Quigley Pages 4-11, Intro to Renaissance
Story of the World Book 2 -Chapter 35 (Book on CD) Renaissance
Jewish History - 1 page with a general overview of how despite persecutions Jews got involved in Business, Science and art then also

I also had planned 4 activities for their lapbooks this week, but I was really pushing them to work on it.  So we sat down and had a little talk.  I told them that I had planned the lapbooks because I thought that they would like it.  I reminded them that last year when we were doing the Ancients we had done the Evan Moor History Pockets and they had really enjoyed them -and they agreed that they had.  Since there weren't History Pockets for the Middle Ages/Renaissance I had thought that lapbooks would be a good substitute and that I got them because I thought they would really enjoy them.  They both told me that they did not like doing the lapbooks,and that they weren't the same as the History Pockets.  Since I had gotten the lapbooks for fun, I decided not to force them to do them.  We will pick up other craft activities from TOG instead to do occassionally.  I need to go look it up, but I believe there are History Pockets on Colonial America and they said they would like to do that, so i will look into adding that next Unit.

Math: 
LM - Adding 4 digit numbers with carrying, place value to 100,000, writing numbers in Standard and Expanded Form
SP - Counting by 4's and 5's, Estimating, Greater than and less than

Spelling/Grammar/Handwriting
We are doing the easy way out with Spelling this year, since we are doing so many other very parent intensive curriculum.  I needed something easy, so we are just using the Spectrum Spelling Workbooks.  At the suggestion of TOG we are using Easy Grammar for Grammar and absolutely love that!  Grammar has quickly become LM's favorite subject.  For Handwriting we are using Zaner Bloser which is recommended in The Well Trained Mind, after trying a few other programs I wasn't happy with.  LM had done some cursive last year, but I wasn't happy with it and decided she wasn't ready.  So I brought her back to a practice handbook and decided to keep them together this year.  This week both girls started cursive (SP for the first time)

LM - Spelling Level 3 - Lesson 9, short u words (like Month, Monday, etc..)  Not sure how we got two lessons behind but that's fine.  Grammar Grade 3 covered mostly contractions all week.  Began cursive writing, letters a-d.

SP - Spelling Level 2 - Lesson 10, words with mp, ng and sk.  Grammar grade 2 is a mixed bag every day generally combining capitalization, punctuation, alphabetizing, parts of speech and making more complex sentences.  SP took to cursive like a fish to water.  She sat down last Monday and did letters a-g and all intermediate pages, before I made her stop.  She loved it.

Literature
LM - I, Juan de Parrera chapters 1-4 as well as a worksheet on re-naming the 1st 4 chapters.  She will be reading this book for 2 more weeks.  For unassigned reading this week she chose from the library Black Beauty which she seems to be enjoying.  She also started the Chronicles of Narnia, reading books 1 and 2 this week and starting book 3.
SP - Leonardo's Horse, we also went through the book and found adjectives and the nouns they were describing.  For reading on her own this week, she has been working through Beverly Cleary books, this week reading Henry Huggins and the Paper Route and Ralph S. Mouse

Art/Music/Misc
Artistic Pursuits Book 2 - Cimabue and Giotto, read a little about their lives and artwork, examined some of their paintings and then made water color paintings.
Music - Story of the Orchestra - Studied the makeup of the orchestra, development of string instruments and then violins.  We also listened to violin music.
Both girls also worked on their typing skills.
Wednesday morning, we made an impulse trip to go ice skating.  Also, after a 3 week vacation, the girls dance and gymnastics class resumed.

Hebrew Studies:
Studied Parsha Bo (Exodus 10.1 - 13.16)  Read the story and did the kids pages on Chabad.org

Modern Hebrew - We are studying how all nouns in Hebrew have a gender.  Since this is not the case in English, it is something they struggle with, so i am going slow. Did a bunch of vocab and worked on matching adjectives to nouns. 

Prayer - Working on memorizing the V'ehavta prayer (Deuteronomy 6.5-9) when we learned the part about writing these words on the doorposts of your house, we learned out Mezuzahs and where they do and do not go.  Counted all the mezuzahs in the house for fun (17!)

Chumash -Continued with Parsha Lech Lecha (Genesis 12.1 - 17.7)  Reading slowly in Hebrew dissecting it into Modern Hebrew and translating into English as we go.  Also studying the shoresh (root letters) and some of the Rashi commentary.

Tzivos HaShem - Learned about the Jewish Leap Year when we add a second month of Adar and where things fall when it is a leap year.

Wow, writing it all out, it seems like we did a lot!  I am so glad I am doing this.  In reality, I don't think we ever did school for more than 3 hours a day.