Weekly Wrap-Up: Peaceful Edition

Hello Cyber Friends! It's time for the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

We had a good week. No we had a great week. It was great because it was peaceful. We defeated 2 problems that have been a hinderance with school.

Problem # 1** was defeated by accident.

** The Problem (#1): The Wee Tot...Don't let the smallness and cuteness fool you. This little miss can drag a school day out an extra 5 hours without a lot of effort on her part. A lot of noise, a huge mess, and sheer determation leads to a long day. And a lot of clean up.

The Solution: On Monday we forgot to turn the tv off in the living room. We were too lazy to go in there and shut it off. For once, being lazy worked to our advantage. We found that the Wee Tot would wander out of the school room and sit in front of Nick Jr., thus sparing us from the havoc that she creates, each and every day, causing our school day to drag on for many more hours than necessary.

I probably should feel guilty about letting her watch so much tv, but I don't. Getting school finished before lunch is sooo worth it. Yes, that's right, I said before lunch. And I think we could've done it even if we'd been working on a history pocket this week.

Problem #2 is: The Mouth- This one, while a bit larger, is also very cute. However the mouth on her is not. We are going through a lovely phase that involves whining, a certain tone of voice, and some disrespect in the form of arguing or talking back. We do not like it. In the end she doesn't like it. We have tried several tactics, none of which have been working. But now, we've found the solution.

The Solution: The Accountable Kids program. I saw it on a blog. I checked it out. It looked good. I bought it. I thought it had possibilities in the long term. I had no idea how quickly it would work for her. I haven't yelled once all week. (At least not at her. LOL) It's a miracle!

So here's our run down on academics.

Math:

She's working on x7's this week. She wants to go back to the x9's. She likes those better. She aces all of her tests but I'd like to see her speed pick up. She worked on Math U See's online drill site today.

Language Arts:

She revisted some old poems that's she memorized and reviewed adverbs. Exciting stuff, I know. LOL

Science:

Weather, weather, weather. We talked about the water cycle and precipation. We learned that Virginia Beach averages about 50" of precipation a year. So we measured to see how deep that would be. That's a lot of rain. Of course that was nothing compared to Kauai, which averages 460". Yikes! We thought it rained a lot when we lived in Guam but it turns out that Guam only averages about 100".

We also did an experiment where we "made rain". We used a bowl, HOT water, plastic wrap and ice. I think Mackenzie was expecting more rain. Like a rain storm. LOL

Social Studies:

We learned more about the Continental Army, or lack there of. We learned how they fought, what they wore, what they endured. We read from The Landmark History of the American People and Winter at Valley Forge.

We also learned different ways children could contribute to the cause from reading Phoebe the Spy (true story) and Toliver's Secret. We're still working on the latter. We're planning a trip to NYC sometime in the future and Mackenzie and I were excited to learn that the tavern in Phoebe is still standing. We're adding that to our list of must do's while we're there.

Mackenzie also did a map assignment from Knowledge Quest Maps. She loves those assignments as they are similar to the mapping assignments she did last year when we supplemented with SOTW activity guides. Here she is learning how to use an historical atlas to complete the assignment.

Extras:

Since Wee Tot wasn't terrorizing us, we got do a couple of art lessons. We use I Can Do All Things by How Great Thou Art. We worked on shading with lines and making ellipses. It's a true miracle!