Week in Review

My loving husband has mentioned that he would like me to post about what we're doing for school. He said once a week, I said once a month. We'll see how it goes.

The Olympics have been our main focus lately. And why not? There is so much potential to use them as a jumping-off point for a number of discussions. Hub spent some time showing Scrappy a bunch of videos about the science of the games. They cover such topics as why lugers and skaters wear those skin-tight suits and where you can "see" kinetic energy transfer from one curling stone to another. Here's a link to a video about the physics of the slap shot.

For math, the kids have been playing games on coolmath.com. I'm such a math slacker this week. I better get on that. But, I have to say, this site offers really fun ways for doing drills.

I've been reading aloud from Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary. We all love Ramona, and she is one of my all-time favorite book characters. The kids already have a list of the books they'd like me to read next. That's so exciting! So many books, so little time.

I have definitely been slacking with having Scrappy and Funny do their own reading. This is something I need to be better at, and perhaps by doing these updates, I will hold myself more accountable.

As for writing, I have noticed that I hear very little complaining from Scrappy when he is writing for his Olympics lapbook, which was made by A Journey Through Learning. It's only a little bit of writing at a time, which I guess he finds manageable. Getting an 8 year old to write really is painful. There is a great article about it here.

Here's the progress on our lapbook so far:

These are some highlights of the past week or so. We normally do a nature walk as well, but there's over 2 feet of snow out there. So I have to think about how to get around that...