Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with a Snag

This week was pretty great, except for one snag.  I’ll get to that later.

We wrapped up our study on Japan and started on Korea.  For her Choose Your Own Adventure she decided to make an origami crane.  It came out pretty good.  She also made a really nice collage about Japanese art forms but I didn’t get a picture of it.

 

She’s continuing to be on math overload.  Two review items on top of her regular math.  One of the review items she LOVES because it’s a game, the other is more like math class so it’s not as popular with her, but it is computer based so she doesn’t mind it.

In science this week we finished up our unit on the respiratory system.  We ended the unit by making a model of the diaphragm and it was co-ol!

 

The yellow balloon represents the lungs and the blue the diaphragm.  When the diaphragm contracts, it creates a vacuum in the chest cavity, filling the lungs with air.  When it relaxes, it pushes air out of the lungs. 

Our snag this week, came in the form of language arts.  As you may recall, we have been using Advanced Language Lessons for grammar and Writing With Skill.   In both cases, we were working off of rough drafts of the books, as neither had been published, as Susan Wise Bauer was gracious enough to share the first 15 weeks of  both while folks while they were waiting for them to be published.  Recently, WWS was released and I have still been waiting on ALL. 

I received an email from UPS early this week stating I had a package being delivered.  A package?  What did I order?  I couldn’t remember.  Then I remembered the ALL that I had preordered.  Maybe??  I checked with Amazon and it wasn’t ALL. Boo…  So I decided to check on the status of publication over at the Well Trained Mind forum.

And that’s where I found the horribly, terrible, no good, bad news.  Due to some snags with ALL, one of the biggest being the mammoth size of it if SWB included everything she felt need to be covered, it was being put on a permanent hold.   Wahhhhhh!!! Wahhhhh!!!  Wahhhh!!!! 

Sure a 1400 page LA book might seem like a lot for a fifth grade curriculum but wahhh!!  We loved First Language Lesson and Advanced Language Lessons was proving to be just as good.  And we have been through A LOT of LA curriculums before we found what worked for us.  The thought of having to find something else…Ugh!

I did find something else to use for grammar, Growing With Grammar.  A friend of mine uses it and likes and, from what I could gather from the samples, it was the closest I could find that covers what I like about ALL.  Sort of.

And I have to give the GWG publishers mad props on their shipping and customer service.  I ordered on Tuesday and it arrived today.  It didn’t take 5 months like some companies. ::cough, cough, WinterCrapPromise cough, cough::  There was even a packing slip involved.  Way to rock it GWG dudes!

And in case you were wondering what was in the “mystery package”…It was a review item and it is AWESOME.   It’s from a company that starts with an “A” and ends with an “pologia.”  Woot!
In other news, cheer and basketball started back up.  I’m back to chanting our lessons in the form of a cheer. lol

And that was our fun-filled week.  Check out other Wrap-Ups over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.