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I’ve been battling both a headstrong 7.75-year-old as well as a vague but pervading sense of ennui or malaise or some-other-French-term-for-the-blahs this week. Maybe it’s because we’ve spent so much time talking about Napoleon.

Anyway, here’s a bit of what les enfants did this week in school.

Language Arts

Reading

We finally finished “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” this week, and we celebrated by watching the movie. The kids (especially Poppy) were not pleased that there were a lot of differences between the book and the movie. They petitioned me to start “Order of the Phoenix” immediately, but I’m sticking to the One Potter Every Year timeline. We’ll see you next year, Hogwarts!

(And when I say “we,” I obviously mean “I.” Because Poppy got all seven books for her birthday. I put the ones we haven’t read yet away, but she’s already re-read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”)

Pete is reading a biography of Marie Curie for his assigned reading. I’m not sure what our next read-aloud will be, but I’m open to suggestions. As long as your suggestion isn’t “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”

Writing

Pete started WriteShop B this year. He’s a very reluctant writer. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to create a story, it’s that he doesn’t want to physically take pencil to paper. That hasn’t been a huge problem with WriteShop, though, because the book he’s on has him dictating a lot of the work to me. Today he did his first writing assignment — a letter to his Papa — and we took turns writing the sentences.

After about a year of complaining about doing her writing, Poppy is finally just sitting down with her notebook and her writing book and getting the work done.

Math

Both kids had math tests today. Poppy got an 87 on hers. After a full hour of telling me why he DID NOT and COULD NOT do his test, Pete finally finished it and got an 86. The reluctance wasn’t because he doesn’t know how to do the work or even because it’s difficult for him. It was just because he’d rather be doing something else, so he’s spent a lot of time whining and a little time actually looking at the paper.

History

We finished talking about Napoleon and the Louisiana Purchase this week. Malaria in St. Domingue (now Haiti) played a role in making Napoleon decide he’d had enough of trying to extend his empire into North America, so our project today was supposed to be trying out some old-timey malaria remedies, like slathering mustard on our persons. Poppy and Pete weren’t keen to do that, though, so they subjected a PlayMobil guy to an ice bath, wrapped him in a blanket and covered him with “hot” bricks to make him sweat his fever away and applied a mustard poultice to his little plastic chest. I am pleased to report that he recovered.

Extracurricular

Poppy has been saying for the past several years that she wants to be a baker when she grows up. So I picked 10 recipes of varying difficulty from a baking cookbook for kids and told her to work her way through them. This morning she made Peanut Butter Kiss cookies all by herself, and they are delicious. Now I just need to teach her about the Cleaning Up After Yourself portion of the craft.

How was your week?

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