Weekly Report #5

Another week gone. We only have one more week to go until our first scheduled week off! I will admit that I am looking forward to it. I think it is good that we have a week off scheduled before any of us hits burnout. I haven't told the boys about it yet. Let them be surprised.

This week I am going to focus on one kid at a time instead of subjects. Ian especially is enjoying our math lessons. His kinder math program consists of brief lessons that use manipulatives--perfect for a four-year-old kid. We also spend time together every day on the calendar and building and recognizing patterns. Here is his workbook with September's calendar nearly completed. I'm trying to not get discouraged that he can't seem to remember the name of the month. He's a preschooler, after all. (He also loves our letter-of-the-week time and seems to grasp it well, but on Thursday he couldn't tell his aunt what the letter of the week was. Sigh. We learned the letter D this week. Here is a page from his Letter-of-the-Week journal:

We read Diary of Worm this week, all of our dinosaur and duck books, and picked out the D sound words in every other book we read together. We had apple cider donuts on Friday at Apple Hill, and and colored pictures of dolphins , dinosaurs (included Dimetridon), and dogs. Ian is going through a phase where he wants me to color for him after about 5 seconds. I'm not sure if it's attention related or his perfectionist tendencies (which seem to run in the family.) Any suggestions? For now, I'm just trying to encourage him to do the things but not pushing him too hard-- so as to avoid having him lose his taste for schoolwork.

Ian also had a lot of fun on Friday and Saturday with his same-age cousin, Talmage. Talmage and his baby sister, Audrey, are visiting from Utah. The boys are two days apart in age and really connect well. Here they are at Apple Hill, being cowboys (with Bronwen.) Ian also got to go (without the rest of us) with Grammy and Papa and Talmage's family to Fairy Tale Land on Saturday. He felt very grown up to be going without his big brothers. Henry told me that he "felt jealous of Ian." I reminded him gently that there are lots of times when Henry and Kimball get to go do something fun and Ian has to stay home because he's "too little." This was Ian's turn.

Henry is continues to eat up his math. Here is one of his worksheetsfrom this week:


He is also making great progress in his reading. He does so well when we read the Book of Mormon aloud together with Daddy in the morning. He also reads aloud on his own each morning for personal study. He can usually read most of the words by himself, which is not an easy task. I truly believe that this practice of reading the Book of Mormon with our kids has improved their reading skills greatly. I didn't push him a lot this week to read on his own, since he had been resistant, but I did catch him reading plenty. Perhaps I need to relax a little on that--all of my kids eat up books as long as we have plenty around. Maybe I'm taking the fun out of it by telling them: Go read a book right now. What do you think?

Here are a couple of pages in Henry's journal this week:

Henry and Kimball enjoyed history this week. We studied the Assyrian Empire under Asherbanipal. We learned about how the Assyrians conquered everyone in Mesopotamia up to the Tigris River, over into Canaan, down into Egypt--a massive empire. We built this Assyrian Siege Tower to mimic those used (on wheels) to allow the Assyrians to ram down city walls and to attack from above as well.

We also learned about the world's first library, built by Asherbanipal in Nineveh. We got busy working on books to put in our own library. These boys have been writing their own books for years, but we are witnessing something of a revival at the moment. Henry wants to work on his book instead of coming to dinner, play outside, or play Sorry! with Kimball. Here are some samples of their books. As you can tell, I am not interfering on content or spelling.

Other subjects we covered together included a discussion on young David and David & Goliath; learning the hymn, "My Redeemer Lives", and a grammar lesson. We listened to A Little Princess in the van and studied Russian all week long. I'm sure we did more than that, but I am so tired of writing this post and it's already my third sitting since I started it!:)

In math this week, Kimball learned about the temperatures (Fahrenheit) where water freezes and boils, plus normal body temperature for humans. He learned about rounding to the nearest 10th, and we did some money work. We reviewed horizontal, vertical, and oblique. We are gradually adding in his multiplication tables. Here is a worksheet from this week:

Here is one of Kimball's journal pages this week. He obviously spent some time thinking about the Assyrians, since this was written a day or two after our first history lesson of the week.

Kimball also finished reading The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, which he has worked on for a few weeks, while getting distracted with the bounty of library books in the basket in his bedroom. One of these days I'll remember to take pictures of some of the library books when the kids aren't sleeping. Off the top of my head, I know he/we read Forty Fortunes, an Iranian fairy tale; Great Wonders of the World (non-fiction),The Legend of the Flying Carpet, several books about Koko, the chimpanzee (which he checks out regularly), Mara, Daughter of the Nile, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and lots more.


Bronwen worked hard at being a mommy to her babies, singing songs with us, looking at books, demanding that we sing more songs, and climbing up into every place she doesn't belong (like on top of the bar and in the middle of the dining room table, for instance.) She woke up so happy from her nap on Sunday that I snapped this photo. She has started saying, "cheese" as soon as she sees a camera. I didn't teach her that, did I?

We finished out our week going to one of our favorite autumn places, Apple Hill, with our cousins, grandparents, aunt, and uncle. We ate apples, apple cider donuts, played in the dirt, rode a tire swing, offered our fingers to goats for nibbling, wandered through pumpkin patches, loitered in apple orchards, and rolled down a big hill with Grammy. Here are a few shots from the fun we had there: