Weekly Report - January 23, 2009

We are finally back in full swing with our school work. It took a couple of weeks after such a long holiday break!

Cullen completed the last story in his Beginner's Bible just yesterday, reading 5 stories a day close to the end, and is incredibly proud of his accomplishment! There are a great many pages to that, you know. He has been reading more each day - more pages/longer time. He also read these two books and is halfway through a third about Whales.

Math is going well. Addition facts are coming faster now, and we continue to do fun/funny drills daily. In his Horizons 2 workbook, he has focused on adding multiple digit numbers with regrouping, telling time (in 5-minute increments) some skip-counting and a little subtraction. We just touched on the concept of borrowing for subtraction.

In science, we learned about molecules and how they sometimes react with each other. The kitchen is cluttered with stuff for our experiments, but I hate to put it all away. We'll use some of the same things early next week for testing acids and bases. Until yesterday, the weather has been pretty cold around here, so I've avoided spending any time outdoors. We really need to get out next week for some time in nature, whether sunny or not.

Ancient Greece, at least the beginnings of it with the Minoans/Myceneans, has been our history focus this past week. The sport of bull-jumping really impressed Cullen. I'm secretly glad that there are no local, modern-day opportunities for him to try!

Cullen has been writing daily, either in his journal or a small assignment from me. This is an area that I am making special effort in this semester. He does seem to resist writing less than he did a few months ago, which I count as serious progress! Our short-term challenge, though, is to write something that does NOT have anything to do with Transformers. More difficult than you might think for my little boy.

For memory work, Cullen learned Deuteronomy 6:5 and is almost finished polishing up the poem, "The Little Turtle"

I've let art and music fall by the way lately, I'm ashamed to say. My goal for the next two weeks is to get those worked into the schedule again. Cullen is joining the children's choir at church, so that will be good for him musically. Next Tuesday, he begins gymnastics. (We stopped TaeKwonDo before the Christmas break.) Baseball begins in March. He and Dad are at the batting cages, as I type, practicing swinging at the ball. Cullen is so excited about working on baseball with his Dad that he could barely stay on the ground this morning!

Here is a photo of Cullen working at Explode the Code phonics online. No matter how many times I tried to get a good shot of him concentrating on his work, his impecible timing for goofy faces always prevailed!

He takes pride in being able to "spoil" photographs like this!