Weekly Wrap-Up: January 16

Our week started off with the heat breaking on Monday morning. This has been an ongoing saga for over a year now, and at the end of the day we were informed that although the heat was working for the moment, we really should replace the entire system because it's just too old. AAAHHH! Not good news.

The rest of the week we had a lot of playdates and our usual activities, plus eye doctor and dentist appointments for Lucy. Compared to our first 2 years of homeschooling, we know a lot more homeschoolers now, and I've got to figure out how to manage all the potential playdates with the necessary time we need at home. I think I've gone a bit overboard with the social activities, but it's so exciting to have all these social opportunities all of the sudden!

We did manage to squeeze in some school work this week. We've started our new grammar curriculum, First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind. So far I'm loving this book. I've got a scripted teacher's book, which is helping me explain grammar concepts more effectively, and then Lucy has a workbook to go with it. Since it's published by the Well Trained Mind folks, it has a classical focus, which fits in so nicely with our other studies. For example, in the chapter about proper nouns, we're also learning the Greek and Roman roots for the days of the week and months of the year. So far we are flying through this curriculum, so I think the run-of-the-mill grammar workbooks we've been working through up to this point have done a fine job, but I love that First Language Lessons is complimenting and reinforcing our classical curriculum.

Lucy decided this week that she wants to say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing "My Country Tis of Thee" each day before we start school. So she made a flag out of paper and we wrote down the pledge and taped these on the wall over our school table. I love it when Lucy comes up with something on her own that she wants to do for school. I'm hoping she'll do more and more of that as she gets older, and take more responsibility for her own education.

Lucy reached an important math milestone this week -- she finished memorizing her times tables through 12. She was very proud of herself. We'll continue to practice them, though, since she tends to forget some if we don't. This means we've nearly finished 3rd grade math. There are just a couple more chapters left in our 3rd grade Math U See book, and then we'll move on to division.

In history Lucy wrote down her own narration for the first time. She did a great job, though the narration was a lot longer than the exercise is supposed to be. I know that part of the point of narration is to learn to express your thoughts succinctly, so next week I'll have her work on editing it down to a couple sentences.

Wow, even though I felt like we did a lot of running around this week and didn't have much time for school, I'm amazed at what Lucy did accomplish. Sometimes I don't realize how much she's learning until I write it down like this!