Journey to Excellence

We had a pretty great week around here, if you ignore the frigid cold temps that blew in! Brrrr! It's been crazy cold! But we are all snuggled up in the house keeping warm. And home is where we will be staying for the next several days as Eli now has the virus that nailed Brynne a couple of weeks ago. His fever has not gotten as high as hers, but he is much better about drinking fluids so I am sure that is helping. On the last warm day before the frigid temps hit. Despite the newest round of sickness to hit us, we had a very productive week. (Don't know if I am going to be able to say that about the upcoming week.) Each day the kids continue to do their math assignments (they have completed Lesson 18 in Math U See), grammar assignments (they continued working on helping verbs), Bible (stick figuring the birth of Jesus), and personal reading (Eli is finishing up a book in the Middle School series by James Patterson and Brynne is reading a new book in the Dear Ameri...

It actually felt great to get back to school this week after being off all last week due to Brynne's sickness! We had a great week of learning! The highlight of our day each day (after watching Carl on CNN Student News) is reading our latest Little House book. This week we read Chapters 13-23 of On the Banks of Plum Creek . So far this is my favorite book in the series. In grammar we learned about helping verbs. And I mean we learned them. You just gotta memorize those suckers. There's no other way around it. To help us out we learned The Helping Verb Song (to the tune of Jingle Bells). By the end of the week Brynne had the song memorized and now knows all 23 helping verbs! Eli almost has it memorized, too. To finish up our study of the parts of a tree, we completed a  Parts of a Tree Unscramble from Education.com and watched the video The Secret Life of Trees by the University of Illinois. These were both very good. As Laura and Mary started attending scho...

All things with school went as planned last week, with the exception of a slower day on Wednesday because I had a really bad sinus headache that I couldn't shake. On that day the kids still got the basics done, worked on their current art project, and watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie . We have been without a Bible curriculum for the past few weeks waiting for our new one to come in, and it did over the weekend. So we were back at Stick Figuring Through the Bible on Monday, this time from the New Testament. We have used Grapevine Studies Level 3-4 for the past two years and it is a highlight of our morning. My kids have learned so much by using it and were excited to start drawing about Jesus! We also moved on ahead in Math U See Delta with two-digit division with remainders. The kids have already learned this with the CTC math curriculum they used over the summer. But it's nice to be building on division from the ground up again. Even though our review...