I didn’t take any pictures at all this week! (Until this afternoon, when I finally hauled out my camera.) That’s a good sign that we didn’t really do any fun project stuff. We had a nice & productive week, but it wasn’t a terrifically exciting one.

Reading

Pete is making good progress on his reading. He’s still trying to memorize the Bob Books — he’s working on Book 5 of the series this week — and sometimes he tries to recite it without even pretending to look at the words. To get around that, I’ve made little flash cards of the words. Sometimes I just ask him to tell me what the words on the cards are, and sometimes I read a sentence from the book to him and have him put it together using the flash cars. He doesn’t like being made to slow down and pay attention, though.

Poppy read “Bad Kitty Gets a Bath” by Nick Bruen and “Pirates Past Noon” by Mary Pope Osbourne this week. She’s flying through chapter books lately; it took her all of two days to read both of those. I’d like to have her try some slightly more challenging material, but she’s entirely against that idea. Any suggestions on that front?

History

We reached the end of Volume One of “Story of the World” this week. We didn’t do any of the additional activities, because I didn’t want to cut a hole in a tennis ball to make a scepter. (I know there were other options. I just had kind of a cranky week, OK?) I’m thinking I’d like to set up a timeline once we start Volume Two next week, but I’m not sure where to put it.

In US history, we’ve been reading about the Constitutional Convention. Poppy will be memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution over the next few weeks, and we’re going to start a unit study on elections pretty soon. It seems like a pretty good time for it.

Math

We haven’t been doing anything all that out of the ordinary in math, but I do want to say that the kids and I love McRuffy math. The hands-on aspect of it makes it something the kids look forward to doing every day. Poppy is also doing Teaching Textbooks 3 twice a week. The McRuffy/TT combination is working really well for us this year.

Extra credit

• Poppy’s piano lessons are going well, but I need to do a better job of encouraging her to practice at home. Her teacher says she doesn’t need to spend huge amounts of time practicing, but I’m guessing more than Zero time would be good.

• Poppy memorized Edward Lear’s “There Was an Old Man with a Beard” this week, and Pete worked on Carl Sandburg’s “Fog.” It was the first non-rhyming poem I’ve asked Pete to memorize, but it’s a short one so it wasn’t too difficult.