The Weekly Report

This was a challenging week, schedule-wise. When I wrote my lesson plans for this year, I just divided the whole she-bang into 30 equal portions, figuring we'd adjust as necessary as we went. But, honestly, there's not a lot of wiggle room to do that adjusting, given what a compressed schedule we're working with already.

So, here we are in our second week of school, in which we have a national holiday (Labor Day) and my husband's birthday. Now, we feel free to ignore and work through legal holidays, especially since we take off so many days that school kids and office workers don't. However, we have a general policy of not doing school on days when Dad is on vacation. He had Labor Day off, and he traditionally gives himself the "gift" of a day off on his birthday.

Because RobotBoy is on a four-day schedule for desk work, we can pretty easily absorb a single day off. However, two days off in a single week presents a bit of a challenge. We went over the assignment list at the beginning of the week, and RobotBoy felt confident he could squeeze in everything he needed to do. I opted to let him try.

This led to some icky moments on Friday, when he overslept and couldn't get into gear, while I was tense about how much he had left to accomplish. Always a bad combination. Things came to a head over the first reading comprehension exercise. He normally eats these things alive, but had left all of the assignments for the week until Friday and was trying to rush through them. Our new grading plan for this year allots him 5 points for every one of these exercises he does "correctly, with good effort." So, I was able to bring things back on track by reminding him of that and telling him that he had already lost one point.

Here's a copy of the grading plan, by the way. We each have one tacked on our cork boards.



Once the smoke cleared, here's how the week looked.

Math - The lessons for this week were about absolute values and how to deal with them in equations. RobotBoy did very, very well with this, turning in perfect-on-the-first-try work for three out of four assignments. As I mentioned above, he has the chapter test still to finish sometime over the weekend. Still on his agenda (perhaps in the car going to and from dance this afternoon) is reading the second chapter of The Number Devil.

History - We're still in the prehistory phase. RobotBoy read from his atlas and a book called Exploring the Ice Age. He also did the "People Who Lived in Caves" story from A Child's History of the World and completed a handout/worksheet on "The Life of the Earliest People."

Reading - Continuing with our prehistoric theme, he read Dar and the Spearthrower.

English - We did the aforementioned reading comprehension exercise in English Prep 2, plus a few more comprehension, grammar and vocabulary exercises. RobotBoy turned in his first draft of his Genesis retelling. It needed some corrections, but he did a good job with them and turned in a nice, clean final draft on Friday. Here's his retelling side-by-side with the model from which he worked:



He also did Lesson 3 of Word Roots, earning a perfect score on his first attempt. (Woo-hoo!)

Science - The highlight of the week was probably finishing his triceratops excavation and assembling the skeleton:



He also finished reading the book that came with the kit, plus the chapter about creation myths from The Story of Science and the introductory chapter of Science in Ancient Mesopotamia. I got him the first disk of the Prehistoric Park series from Netflix, and he thoroughly enjoyed the first three episodes. Even though we'll be moving on from dinos next week, I may go ahead and bring in the second disk, just for fun.

Languages - He continues to enjoy Greek Alphabet Code Cracker, and his first assignments from Hey Andrew! earned good reviews, too. So far, he's learned the first four letters. I was very pleased at how well he got through his first "real" assignments in Latin Prep, even remembering some of the vocabulary he was familiar with from last year. He also did quite well with the first few workbook exercises. And he did several pages of listening exercises from The Learnables Spanish Grammar Enhancement, which seemed to go well.

Geography - The lesson for this week introduced the concept of the world as a village of 100 people. He watched an online presentation about the idea and then did an assignment that required him to find specific statistics. It seemed to make a big impression.

Art - RobotBoy turned in his first hands-on art projects this week. This is not an area of strength for him, so we'll see how it goes. Again, this is a course he chose to do for fun, so I just hope he has a good time learning some basics.

He still has a few tidbits to make up over the weekend, but I feel pretty good about what we accomplished in a very short and interrupted week.