Weekly Wrap-Up: Trying Something New

Happy Saturday! I'm late posting our Wrap-Up this week; Tiny Girl and I were at the barn yesterday afternoon, and last night was Girl Scouts Mother-Daughter Bingo night. Big fun around here!

We had a good week. I'm feeling more energized and confident after my epiphany last week. Still more plans to put into action, but we went back to our roots and tried some new things this week that worked well. Nothing like a bit of success to put a whole new perspective on things.

Several subjects clicked along: devotion/Bible study using Keys for Kids, which we enjoy; cursive copywork, Miss Priss working on AO selections for Return to Gone Away and Tiny Girl on AO selections from The Peterkin Papers; grammar, in which we studied comparative and superlative adjectives; spelling with Spelling Power, which works well with both my strong speller and my challenged speller; we completed the introduction pocket for our Colonial America history pockets; French with Rosetta Stone; and piano lessons and daily practice.

Other activities included:

• For poetry, a study I'd been neglecting but we all enjoy, we began reading and discussing AO selections of Emily Dickinson's poems.
• In math, Miss Priss cycled back through lines of symmetry, graphing, and basic operations practice in Mathematical Reasoning. Tiny Girl left geometry behind for a bit and returned to basic arithmetical operations and a bit of algebra in MEP Year 4.
• We continued our study of the brain in Professor IQ Explores the Brain, by Seymour Simon. This week, we explored the cerebrum, cerebral cortex, and brain hemispheres.
• Literature selections included the first two chapters of Robinson Crusoe, which the girls are listening to on the computer; a selection from Caesar in Plutarch's Lives; Anne of Green Gables for Miss Priss; and The Peterkin Papers for Tiny Girl.
• In our What Makes a Rembrandt a Rembrandt? book, we took a close look at two paintings, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and Flora. We also discussed Rembrandt's ingenious use of chiaroscuro, an Italian word meaning a strong contrast between light and dark.

On Friday, we mixed things up a bit. The girls already have their Timothy Ministry enrichment classes that afternoon, so are mornings have been rushed. To help lighten the load but still keep the brain juices flowing, I substituted multiplication games and drills on Multiplication.com and Aplusmath.com for our regular math lessons. I also removed grammar and spelling study from our Friday schedule and had the girls work on two Mind Benders puzzles, which they love, and Miss Priss also completed four pages from Building Thinking Skills. By assigning logic studies to Fridays, our Monday through Thursday schedule is freed up a bit more. At first, Tiny Girl was hugely disappointed at the loss of logic every day, but she survived.

So that's our week! To read more Wrap-Ups and glean some ideas and encouragement, pop over to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.