This Week in learning {Week 17}

This week started out great! It seemed the perfect mixture of school, Advent, and other "stuff". Then along came Wednesday! We ended up with more out-of-house activities than we should have in a week.

Thursday morning was tough and it was clear the boys weren't ready for book work so we watched a children's French lessons show (Bonjour Les Amis-if I'm remembering correctly). Caleb picked up the cat and sat down in the chair. The cat isn't allowed on the furniture and would normally just jump off anyway, but he heard the French woman talking in French and he became a different cat. Zebra sat and watched that whole video with us. We've determined he is originally from a beach community in the south of France. This would explain why he freaked out when we had snow last month. First we thought he was from Florida or most likely Hawaii but the comfort of hearing French made the south of France the most obvious choice.  ; )

 

We enjoyed our new schedule for Advent! Some days our school work ran into our lunch break but we took extended lunch breaks and then did our Advent reading after that. Our afternoons were free for extra activities which we all enjoyed. The only change I want to make for next week is more Advent reading. We may do that during Morning Basket along with our Afternoon Basket.

The boys did math, language arts, and a little religion this week. We continued with our normal Morning Basket time too. We did drop history and science. I rearranged the schedule just a tad to get it all fit into our morning. 

Morning Basket was cut short each day we did it (3 days). We read from Sentence Island, The Fallacy Detective, and Faith & Life 5.

After lunch we read Letters From Father Christmas every day. We all enjoy this book! It is letters J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his children at Christmas addressed from Father Christmas. We also read Read-Aloud Book of Bible Stories for our Jesse Tree readings, but we moved this to the evening so that Scott could take part. This book is a gem! The stories are written to keep your attention and the stories match up perfectly with our Jesse Tree ornaments. On Friday, we read The Baker's Dozen: A Saint Nicholas Take. 

I had hoped to read several more books so I will need to organize better for next week. Next week isn't as busy so it should go better!

Tyler has been typing away out of his keyboarding book. It took Caleb over a year to finish it and Tyler is half done in about a month. He does this during his independent work so I'm not sure if he is picking up on it or not. I need to watch him and make sure he at least has his fingers set up on the keyboard correctly and maybe have him slow down!

Tyler finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this week. I highly recommend this version of the book! It has glossy pages, color pictures, and the font is perfect. Tyler enjoyed it too and asked for the next book he was going to read to have glossy pages too. Even though we have the rest of the books in that series, none are the collector's edition, I'm thinking about getting The Horse and His Boy in the collector's edition too. Tyler started that one this week and wasn't too happy about the lower quality book. ; )

We added a thirty minute break into our mornings a few weeks ago and this has been a very positive addition to our schedule. It's the perfect amount of time needed for us at this moment. When the weather is nice the boys spend all of that time outside. I do some chores and check email. Tyler has been good about pulling us out of break to continue with school (which I need half of the time). I work with Tyler on math and spelling after morning break and it's our last hour before lunch break, so he is ready to get started to get done.  ; ) 

Caleb's favorite thing to do in school this week was math and Tyler's was Life of Fred. 

I didn't get any pictures this week because my camera went missing most of the week (Scott takes it duck hunting and then leaves it in the truck for days afterwards). All I found on the Caleb's Kindle was cat pictures! The cat enjoys looking at himself on a screen.