Weekly Wrap-Up: November 6

Wow was this week busy! We had a bunch of play dates scheduled this week, along with our usual activities, Girl Scouts and dance for Lucy, and preschool for Matthew. It was one of those weeks where I was longing for a little more home in our homeschool! We all had a great time hanging out with friends, though. And we did managed to get a fair amount of school work done as well. We read the "Christianity Comes to Britain" chapter in The Story of the World. This piqued Lucy's interest in England, so we got a book about England from the library with nice pictures, which I've been reading aloud. We also got a DVD called "Families in the United Kingdom," and another from Netflix about traveling to England. I'm excited that Lucy's interested in England because I love England and have traveled their twice. I got out all my England photos and Lucy and I had fun looking through those. We also read some stories about St. Patrick, and Lucy read a kid's version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, along with about 15 or 20 other library books. I got a huge stack of books for her Saturday and she's already read through them all. Her appetite for reading is huge!

Lucy did the usual assortment of other subjects: Spelling, Grammar, Memory Work (she's memorizing the helping verbs), Writing, Handwriting, Latin, Bible, Music, Church History, Art, Science, and Math. We've been using a game for learning multiplication tables that's working really well. It's called Timez Attack. It's a bit of an investment ($40 for the full version), but it's really improved Lucy's memory for the times tables, so it's been great! Matthew and I have started The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, from Peace Hill Press. He's really interested in words and letter sounds right now, so I figure I'll work with him a bit on it as long as he's interested. He's been watching phonics DVDs from Leap Frog, and those have done a great job of teaching him letter sounds.

The highlight of the week is today, which is Lucy's birthday. She's turning 9 at 7:45 p.m and she's very excited about it. She's having a friend sleep over tonight to celebrate, and then we're having a Harry Potter party tomorrow. I can't believe I have a 9 year old!!