Weekly Wrap-up ~ Before the Week is Even Over

Last week and this week have been the regular summer school weeks that I always plan for us to have. It is important to me that the kids continue with reading, math, and grammar, because math and grammar are subjects that can have concepts "lost" after a few months of break. We only do two hours of school a day in our summer weeks, and more than an hour of that is reading.

Yesterday I told the kids how absolutely proud I am of them for what they have accomplished in their work this summer. They have been doing some complicated addition of fractions, mixed numbers and uncommon denominators. It's not really something you want to do in the summer. But they have done their math lessons like champs and have mastered all of the skills they have been confronted with so far.

Fred is in the house now, too! We started Life of Fred: Fractions last week. We will do one chapter of the book two days a week.

The kids are also one week away from completing the first level of Fix-It Grammar by IEW, "The Nose Tree". Throughout much of last year Eli really struggled with grammar, with identifying the different parts of speech and diagramming his sentences. He would get very overwhelmed and very upset. But the last two weeks the concepts have just clicked with him, and it has been so great to witness!

Both kids are reading books that they really enjoy. Eli is into the How to Train Your Dragon series and absolutely loves it! Brynne is waiting for her next Warriors book to arrive so she has been reading books again from The Puppy Place series. These books have inspired her to want to have a dog adoption agency someday.

Finally, we are only two days away from finishing the last book in the Little House on the Prairie series, The First Four Years. Man, reading this series and studying the late 1800's pioneering days was such a blessing to us, and we will miss the Ingalls family!! Thankfully, we are only on Season 3 of the television series, so we have a lot more stories to experience.

A real summer break starts for us next week until August 31st, when we start our full-time fall schedule. We will put away all of our worksheets, but keep out our reading books. During our break we are going to go visit some friends and their farm, go to a water park, go on a field trip, visit family, get through all our remaining doctor and dentist appointments, start volleyball practices, go to speech therapy, celebrate Brynne's birthday, swim, go to the Wipeout Run (5K), take some back-to-school photos, and more.

After all this fun, it will be time to hit the books again!!

One last thing ... the winner of the book Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library is my commenter, poetryinleaves. Please e-mail me your address at taulmans@netzero.net. Congrats!