Weekly Report - Week 2

An obstacle course for a hamster.
LB Mixing colors. Good to know that red and yellow still make orange. See, I really do stuff with the little one.



And example of a good day of math problem solving. These were to reinforce place value.
Look, it is a punctuation worksheet from Just Write 2.

Week number 2 is offically over. I actually marked off Day 9 today. Only 171 to go.

Math is going steadily. CC still isn't a fan of math, but she does her work everyday. We are working through Math Mammoth Add and Substract 2B and Place Value 2 before we start in Singapore 3A. I finally received Knock Out from Muggins Math. Wow! I like it. You take three dice and add them together, then break the number apart to cover numbers to win points. CC is much faster figuring the nummers out than I would have thought. She didn't even complain about math being involved in the game.

Writing worked well this week. I really like Just Write. The lessons are well-written and direct. The sentences are varied and interesting. We have done about 10 pages so far and we have no complaints.

The handwriting book came in the mail Thursday so I decided to sneak in a lesson. I am trying Can-Do Print by the HWT people. CC wants to improve her writing, but her reading level is far beyond typical for second grade so she detests most handwriting books. They are simply too simple for her. The Can-Do book uses small lines and has jokes in the instruction. It starts with reviewing letter formation at a pace of three letters a lesson. Then it moves to grammar and punctuation review, Greek and Latin root words, and then moves to writing instruction. I had planned to do one lesson today, but after initially balking at the lesson, CC finished the first lesson and then did the second on her own. She really likes the little lines and the fact that it starts with words like cocoa instead of cat.

She is loving the cottage school This week she learned how to make Venn diagrams, learned two new songs -one in English and Spanish, made the main body of a piggy bank which will be fired and glazed later, and disagreed with the teacher about whether it was wrong of Rome to change the ancient Olympics when they took over Greece. She just seems so much older since she started school.

LB misses her sister immensly on the day she is gone. She loves spending the day with all of the attention, but would trade it all for her sister. CC found the McGuffey Primer that I had bought when she was learning to read and realized that it is probaly the same type of Primer that Laura and Mary learned to read from. She has decided that she wants to use it to teach LB to read. She spent most of the day trying to convince a relucant 3 yo to sit still while she teaches her. I thought it was priceless.

BB is still looking for another job. Anybody need an 18yo with no experience for a few months? He needs money and is moving to Tokyo in January. We filled out more loan documents this week which is always exciting, and we haven't heard anything about the scholarship. He spent one day at the hospital visiting a friend with cancer.

I sorted clothes this week. I boxed up LB's old clothes for my great niece, Baby G. I also dug out the size 4 wintery clothes that I had saved to pass down to LB. I can't believe she wears a 4 . CC offically has 1 pair of long pants and 3 pairs of cropped pants for this winter/fall. She also has 3 shirts, 2 dresses and 2 skirts that fit. I had to bite the budget and buy some new clothes for that girl. She is sprouting up like crazy. If she doesn't slow down, she'll be taller than me before she gets out of elementary school.