Week in review, August 27-31

We had another great week of school! I tweaked our schedule a bit this last weekend, and it helped Alex and Ben's day move along a little more smoothly. Ethan continued with his AWESOME attitude, even {imagine me falling over right here} doing schoolwork in the evenings just because he wanted to!

Not that the week was perfect or entirely conflict-free ... you can probably imagine how well the day went that started out like this:

Jumping games aside, Ethan:

*completed five lessons in CLE 500, moving him into the second Light Unit. (We started this earlier this summer, so he's a little bit ahead of where he would be otherwise.)
*completed six lessons in Winning with Writing
*completed three lessons in Growing with Grammar (and likes only having grammar scheduled three times a week!)
*completed three lessons in The World of Plants - among other things, he gave a short presentation on why plants are important in industry, dug up grass to inspect the roots, and constructed a model plant cell (no pictures of any of that because I tend to forget to take them.)
*continued work on Geography through Literature. This week he studied ponds and sawmills, did more mapping, completed vocabulary work from Paddle to the Sea, and more.
*continued with Wordly Wise vocabulary
*blew through three more spelling lists with Sequential Spelling
*studied Georgia and New Jersey in his state study

*read lots of books. I forgot to mention this last week, but we're not doing a formal reading or literature program, he's just reading a lot and talking to us about it. This week his favorites that he finished were Swallows and Amazons and Rakkety Tam. He was thrilled to find out that Swallows and Amazons was the first in a series, declaring it "one of the best books I've ever read." Rakkety Tam is another book in the Redwall series, a long-standing favorite of his.

Alex:

*worked on fun thinking skills games with Mom - his favorite this week was Trucky.
*studied the water cycle. We read lots of books and also did several fun activities and experiments, including making a water cycle bracelet with glow-in-the-dark beads, making it rain, seeing water vapor on a mirror, and watching food coloring move through shaving cream to simulate rain coming through a cloud.

For some reason, this is the only picture I got of Alex other than the jumping ones.

As you can see, that last experiment was mostly a fun way to make a mess. I saw it here, and if you click through to the link you can see that they made lovely prints with the colored shaving cream with they were done. My boys? Made - and I quote - "swamp water". Alex narrated the entire water cycle to me at the end of the week, though, so it would seem he did learn something!
*played more math games
*once again turned his nose up at anything that came in workbook form.

Ben:

 
*made faces
*played with little cars
*colored a couple of pictures
*stuck popsicle sticks in slots in a box
*saved the world several times (I know this because he went around yelling, "Don't worry! I'll save you!")
*wore his shoes on the wrong feet on purpose

Together, they

*completed five more lessons in The Bible Study Guide for All Ages. They seem to be enjoying this, and I'm a little surprised at the amount of detail Alex (and even Ben) are recalling.
*played some strange game where they couldn't step on the floor of the school room (during school), so they had to hop around from crate to pillow to chair to crate and back again
*didn't wear shirts and showed me their muscles