Week in Review 10/4/10-10/8/10

Monday, Will and I participated in 40 Days for Life by praying for an hour in front of an abortion clinic. This is the 3rd time we've done this together.


Here's the academic stuff we accomplished this week:

History
Sean - Discovering music - unit 5 or 6? how the church and the Reformation effected development of music history. Very interesting.
Becky - I'm reading her Elizabeth and the Three Crowns - about St. Eliz of Hungary. We looked up Wartburg Castle and Thuringia. She's decided to be St. Elizabeth at our All Saints Party 11/1.
Josh -we are now meeting with another teen to study Church History together. Josh just completed 1/3 of Ch. 1


Math
Sean is up to Lesson 17 in Saxon 7/6
Becky - Lesson 11 in Saxon 5/4
Josh - Lesson 93 and test 23 in Saxon Algebra II

Latin
Becky just learned about plurals in the first declension
Sean started Lesson 24 in LfCa; more vocab and future tense of esse
Josh and I are learning the passive tense for 4th conjugation

Writing
Becky and Sean are both working on cursive; Becky finished Week 11 in WWE. She's complaining it isn't challenging enough. I think she's right! We might bump her up.
Sean did little creative writing this week, :(
Josh wrote a short essay in history; also little creative writing :(
However, Sean, Josh and Will all decided to participate in NaNoWriMo next month.
I also did some informal spelling with Sean and Becky this week.

Science
Nada for Becky and Sean - yikes, it is falling through the cracks again as it always does!!!!! Gotta get on the ball!
Josh did Bio. homework, attended both Biology classes and took a Biology test this week.

Literature/reading:
Josh is reading St. Augustine's Confessions - we did the study questions through book 3.
Sean is reading a Series of Unfortunate Events and he just started reading St. Patrick's Summer Catechism.
Becky is still working on her chapter book. I continue to read aloud Little Men with Sean occasionally listening in.

Art
Sean and Becky attended their art class and enjoyed it, but they still don't seem to be clicking with the teacher. So I don't know if I am going to continue paying for something that I have to cajole them into attending. This has become a point of dismay and frustration with my dearly beloved children!

Sean's is the top painting. You can see Becky's signature on hers.

Music
Sean's back to playing a lot of piano this week. He sort of had lost interest for a few months there. He's also taken to playing the ocarina. He played happy birthday to Rick on it, but it doesn't have quite the octave range he needed!
Will attended both his sight reading, etc class and his piano lesson. He's coming along wonderfully. Very hard working. He's been practicing a lovely Bach piece this week.

The kids put on a show for Rick (except Josh who was off doing math). His birthday was Tuesday. Unfortunately, the camera chose that time to run out of batteries so I don't have any pics! Here's Becky icing his cake.She insisted on putting 48 candles on the cake as well as the numerals. I thought it looked very Seussian!




Josh had lots of varying experiences with tests this week. He took a preliminary drivers ed test on line and passed. He got 74%. He was kind of tickled since he hasn't studied anything at all. On Tuesday he got back the test he took in Latin last week and got an F. He was pretty shocked. The teacher pulled a fast one on us! She said that from now on she is counting macrons. Before she'd say, try to remember where the macrons go, but only take of 1/10 or 1/4th of a point. Now you get a full point off! So the stakes are higher! Hopefully, he'll retake the test next week. Then Josh took a Biology test on Tuesday. The teacher graded it very quickly, except for the essay and said he'd gotten a 91 but he wouldn't know his final score til she'd read the essay. Well, he got his test back and he'd really gotten an 83%. Turns out she had miscalculated before and he didn't do very well on his essay. So that was a bit of a bummer. But he did do very well on his Algebra II test. The tutor didn't grade it but she said he got everything right except for one little aspect of something. She said he had done very well.

We don't do tests at all in the lower grades, except for the California Achievement Tests and it is always a long, hard learning curve when the kids get up into high school level and start having to deal with testing. Here's a photo of Josh's 10th grade school books.


Friday was unschooling. Will slept in (he'd had a nasty headache the night before), Josh went to Biology in the a.m., Sean read A Series of Unfortunate Events and Becky helped me bake stuff for the 4H Bake Sale this weekend. Then we had tennis in the afternoon.

With all the baking this week, it was a terrible time to start Weight Watchers. I do believe I will weigh more than I did last week. It will be humilitating to get on the scale! I just can't have baked goods sitting around my house if I'm going to lose weight! Absolutely no will power, whatsoever! Next week, no sweets in the house, at all!