Week 7 Report

It is our 7th week of homeschooling 2nd grade and it's been a doozy! Monday was a federal holiday and Camille was with her dad and the day was spent picking her up. Tuesday morning I woke up sick with an upper respiratory infection, Danny had a cold and Camille was fine. I didn't start feeling better until yesterday, Friday so school was at a minimum all week. Camille is now sick with a cold. Fun, fun, fun. It has been snot-ville here this week! Lol.

Today (Saturday) we are doing history and science only. We're in Chapter 6 of SOTW 2 and in Lesson 4 of our Earth Science/Astronomy lessons. I'm not posting pictures this week due to the fact we're leaving Tuesday morning for my parents' house and I have a lot of catching up to do in our housework and getting ready to be gone for a week. Not to mention this past Thursday we went grocery shopping for the month instead of doing school. This week I abandoned Bible and grammar for the most part.

I had Camille do her math work each day, read to me and independently, we did a little french but will repeat the lesson next week, we finished with Vivaldi* and her weather journal suffered inconsistency this week. There was a lot neglected this week but we're still on track with our lessons for the year. I checked our Year At a Glance to see what damage has been done to our time and it is minor.

*In our music lessons, I decided to forgo any notebooking at this time. We are just listening to the song everyday, singing the lyrics, reading the Themes to Remember information about the composer and reading the other books we have on hand about the composers.

In our Earth Science/Geography lesson today, we will read from our spines, make a rain gauge from The Geography Book, read our supplement books: The Snowflake: A Water Cycle Story by Neil Waldman, The Man Who Named the Clouds by Julie Hannah, and The Cloud Book by Tomie de Paola. We will do the interactive activities at the Usborne quicklinks site and watch "Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow" and "Junior Oceanographer: Oceans, Weather and Climate" at United Streaming. I may skip the vocabulary this week.

A note about our library's interlibrary loan system: It is being overworked right now, the individuals libraries are having difficulty keeping up with all the new patrons who have discovered interlibrary loan. I talked to our head librarian and explained that 10 weeks is just too long to be waiting for a book that has 34 copies within 272 libraries across the state. We're in our 7th week and there are books I requested a month before we even started that have not come in! She asked me to put it in their suggestion box so that she can report the complaint, "they are working on it" she said. So, if you're part of the Georgia Pines library system, please stick a note in the suggestion box next time you're at the library- who knows, maybe it will help motivate some changes in the library system. Last year I checked out over 400 books through the interlibrary loan system, books on homeschooling, education, parenting, reading books for science, history, math, and anything else we needed. The system is worse this year. I have decided to limit the amount of books I request this year as much as possible, maybe it will help.

We have a busy weekend, so I'll end here. I'm working on our plans for french, French for Children by Bruzzone is wonderful and worth getting if you have a child just starting out in french. I've cut a sheet protector so that I can slide it over the page for Camille to write on instead of photocopying the page or allowing her to write in the book. We have other activities for her to do to document her learning- I'll share more about all of this when I get back from my parents'. I have a few others things in the works, like teaching Camile about time management and about sibling rivalry. Reading Storytime with the Millers has been great!

The Home School Enrichment (magazine) Sept/Oct 2007 issue is wonderful if you have an opportunity to pick it up.