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Weekly Wrap-up ~ Chugging Along (Prairie Primer - Silver Lake Week 4)


Steady. Solid. No bells and whistles. That was this week.

But it was good. It has gotten to where it is just really good. We get up, get started, get it done. Everybody is pretty motivated and has good attitudes. I really can't ask for more right now.

What were we doing this week?

Bible had us learning about the different names of Satan this week and about how to battle him with the Full Armor of God.

CNN Student News is always the highlight of our morning. We have a trip planned to tour the CNN Headquarters in Atlanta in August. The kids are VERY excited! Hope we can bump into Carl Azuz!

We finished By the Shores of Silver Lake this week. We love the Little House series. I really think we will be so sad this summer after we finish all of the books. We will still have the series to watch, though. We are on Season 3, Episode 5. (This week Brynne drew a floor plan for what she believed the claim shanty looked like based on the description in the book.)


I see marked improvement in identifying all of the parts of speech in Fix It Grammer's "The Nose Tree" by IEW. The kids get through that daily lesson pretty quickly each day.

The kids are loving their personal reading time. Brynne is still reading the first book in the Warriors series and Eli is reading another book from the Middle School series. No complaints when it's reading time!

These are the things we do in the mornings. In the afternoons we tackle math, right after lunch before we start to get sluggish. We have finished all of the division lessons for Math U See Delta and are finishing up the last few lessons of this level next month. This week the kids learned all about calculating Volume. We pulled out the manipulative so that they could visualize it.



We are still excited about learning all of the state capitols and watching the clips about each state on "The States". Only one more week and we will have learned all of the capitols. It's been great to have them learning something that they really enjoy!

I have a funny story to tell that they will kill me for when they are older. I went to Taylar's grandpa's funeral on Wednesday at the funeral home across the street from our house. I left the kids to finish up some work. One of the things they were going to do was watch three episodes of "The States" and then practice their capitol flashcards. When I got home they weren't in the living room. I found Brynne laying on a blanket in the hall outside the bathroom. Eli was on the other side of the door taking care of some "business". He was drilling her on the capitols, using the flashcards on his side of the door and she was yelling her responses back to him. I was very impressed with their good use of time!

We went back this week and finished up some lessons on the Transcontinental Railroad by watching a couple of videos from History.com ("Transcontinental Railroad" and "Evolution of Railroads") and doing a little real-life math with word problems about the Transcontinental Railroad.


We are participating in the Great Backyard Bird Count this year so we re-watched our "Your Backyard" dvd to familiarize ourselves with probable birds in our area. We started counting and reporting today.


We always finish off our day by watching our Little House episode and reading anywhere from 15-30 minutes.

Today it's Freedom Friday and the kids had a little math and grammar to finish. They wrote the sloppy copy of their Letters of Invitation. They played outside on this warmish day, running off some energy. And then they ended their day reading for about an hour.

And that was our week.

Like I said ... Steady. Solid. No bells and whistles. That was this week.

And Dawson has senioritis! He was also sick this week with a real illness and missed a day and a half of school. Monday he was feeling like this. Notice his shoes. They are moccasins (slippers). He started a trend at school ... Moccasin Monday. He really does wear his slippers to school on Mondays. This kid is such an individual. I hope he never loses his courage to be himself.


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Comments

  1. I really didn't think that my kids would like CNN Student News, but they do! They ASK to watch it every day! We've even tried getting our homeschool mentioned in Roll Call. LOL And I learn from watching it too as I don't watch much news otherwise. (So depressing! :/ ) I wish one of my kids liked Little House! Maybe I need to borrow someone's kid that does! LOL

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  2. It looks like a great week Nikki!! I am laughing at the bathroom story. ;) And yay for Dawson. Keilee is such an individual and I often wonder if public school would 'change' that. I am so glad it hasn't for Dawson. Keilee has watched CNN Student News every day for almost 3 years. She knows SO much about what's going on in the world. And she loves puny Carl. :)

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