Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Our 11th Week

This week was very exciting for us as a family. We were able to attend a filed trip to Sacramento riding a train. We always wanted to travel by train and we could not just find the right time and the save enough money; traveling by train can be very expensive and we are five in the family. So this week, Amtrak had a homeschooling field trip enabling us five to go in much cheaper expense. Here are some pictures I took from that day.








I also took some pictures for their last day of P.E. for this year. We don't do P.E. until next year because of frequent rain and wet field.





The rest of the week went well. Most of the stuff we needed to do were done. And we are of to our one week Thanksgiving vacation. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Our 10th Week

This week we had our windows replaced and the work took 3 days. It was loud with all the constructions going on and my kids, of course get distracted easily. All I heard myself saying for 3 days is "Stay in your chair and focus!" With the men, in and out of the house, I can't blame my kids trying to wonder what was going on.

So our goal this week was at least to finish the important subjects, Math and Language Arts. We were able to squeeze some history readings and Alden and I was able to do some Science stuff. We are still on mammals this week and we were able to watch Discovery Channel and found out more about whales.

Jhoshua, on the other hand, has been good with keeping up with his list this week. Every Monday I would give him a list of his work for the whole week and he had to check it off and make sure it was done. At the end of the day, he has to give it back to me and I had to check his work. For a couple of weeks , he has been struggling keeping up with his weekly assigned work, he either forget something or skip something. I keep reminding myself to be patient with him since this is his start of being accountable to his own work. And I am so happy that of all the commotion in our house this week, he was able to finish his work without complaining.

Jhoshua and I were also reading Oliver Twist and Shades of Gray this week. He wanted to read on his own this year and we would meet to discuss after. I thought this will be difficult for me keeping up with his reading so I tried scheduling my reading at night now and at least I don't have to worry the next day for our discussion. He has been asking questions now, more of the hows and whys, so I know he is starting to ponder more about what he is reading about and enjoying it more.

Alden has been picking up his reading pretty well. Finally, decoding is kicking in.
We were not able to go to our P.E. this week because of the window repair and the boys were not happy about it but there is always next week. It's starting to get cold outside so Nature walk had been moved to morning walks instead of afternoons.

So to sum it all up, I think we have done pretty good despite of the noise and distraction we had this week. Have a great weekend!