The non-homeschooled kids in our town had Monday of for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Tuesday was a teacher work day. They went to school on Wednesday, but they went back home by 10am because the side roads were icy. They went to school yesterday, and last night it snowed six inches so school’s canceled again today.

My homeschool kids, meanwhile, had school every day this week. This week was one of the few times they envied the public school kids’ schedules.

It wasn’t all protractors and sentence-diagramming this week, though. They finished school by 1pm every day this week and spent their afternoons as they wished, and they’ve already had a snowball fight and a mug of hot chocolate today.

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US Geography

This week we studied Tennessee, and today we made Dollywood cinnamon bread. The recipe calls for an unbaked, frozen loaf of bread, and Rockford grabbed pre-baked mini-loaves when he braved the pre-snow-ravaged grocery store yesterday. The bread still came out delicious, though. We also read a biography of Davy Crockett over the course of the week, and we watched a short documentary called “For the Love of Music: The Story of Nashville.” I had hoped it would focus on Nashville’s history a bit more, but it wasn’t bad.

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Language Arts

Reading

We finally finished “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” this week, and the kids started the movie almost as soon as I’d closed the book. They were not pleased with the differences between page and film. We started “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” yesterday, so we’ll be reading that for the foreseeable future.

Grammar

We’re reading and working through the exercises in “The Giggly Guide to Grammar” together. This week we talked about pronounces and action verbs.

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Math

Poppy is doing a lot of work with fractions these days, and she’s also examining three-dimensional shapes. I wish the McRuffy manipulatives kit came with 3D models of the shapes, because I have a hard time visualizing all of the faces and edges. A hands-on model would be helpful. She’s doing pretty well with it, though.

UPDATE: I want to draw everyone’s attention to the brilliant comment my brilliant friend Rachel left.

It’s good to have smart friends.

END UPDATE

Pete has been doing division. He wasn’t having a problem with it until this week, when he got to dividing by 8. I think we need to do some work on his multiplication tables above 7.

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Do your kids get days off for bad weather? What’s your favorite snow-day memory?

Wanna read more about homeschooling? Check out the Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers weekly linky thing!