We hit our 100th day of school this week, and we did absolutely nothing to mark the occasion. But we had a pretty productive week anyway.

Math
This week’s math lessons continued to be laborious until this morning. Poppy’s worksheet today was all word problems, and instead of making her sit down, read and solve them, I read them to her while she did a puzzle. When she needed a visual, I drew it for her on a small dry-erase board, but for the most part she just answered the questions without prompting. It was such a relief to have a frustration-free math lesson.

Spanish
I didn’t think we had a microphone on the computer Poppy uses for Rosetta Stone Spanish, so we haven’t been using the pronunciation feature. But this week she discovered that there is indeed a microphone built in, and she’s been enthusiastically practicing with it ever since. She has to do her regular lesson before she gets to play with the microphone, though, so she’s been zipping through them quickly this week.

Physical education
Ballet class, as usual.

Recitation
Poppy worked for two weeks on Sara Coleridge’s “A Calendar” before she had it memorized. It was quite a bit longer than any other poem she’d done before. This week she did a much shorter one — “The Falling Star” by Sara Teasdale — and she had it down by Wednesday.

Reading
We seem to be going through a Frances Hodgson Burnett phase. We finished “A Little Princess” last week, and we started “The Secret Garden” on Monday. We’ve been reading a chapter a day at lunchtime, so Pete’s involved in our reading, too. I read this many, many times when I was young, but this is the first time I’ve read it out loud. And speaking with a Yorkshire accent? Not happening for me. So I’m having to “translate” all the Yorkshire on the fly. I’m sure that detracts from the book somewhat, but at least the kids can understand what I’m trying to say.

Geography
We studied Vermont this week, and Poppy was very excited to learn that two of her favorite things are made there: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and maple syrup.

Science
We hosted a meeting of a fledgling science co-op this week. I’ve been referring to it as “science club,” because “co-op” seems more formal than what we’re actually doing. There were three other little girls in attendance this week, and they played in Poppy’s room for about 20 minutes before we did our “experiment,” which was based on “The Magic School Bus in the Artic.” We read the book first, then I pulled out a bag of ice, a bowl of ice water, a “polar bear mitt” and a “walrus mitt.” The instructions for the activity are on the Scholastic website. It was very easy to pull together, but it ended too quickly for Poppy. She wanted “more experiments.” Duly noted, kiddo.

Our school curriculum has changed quite a bit since we started the year. We finished with “Five in a Row” and the Zaner-Bloser handwriting book last month, and we never started Girl Scouts. We also added a few things after our Christmas break, thanks mostly to that gift card from Dad.

Spanish
Poppy finished the first unit of Rosetta Stone Spanish on the last day before Christmas break, which was a totally serendipitous thing. She’s had a hard time this week with jumping up to the next level, but I’m sure she’ll figure it out.

Health
We’re still working with the same health book. It doesn’t have as many accompanying activities as Poppy would like, but I’ve been pleased with it as an introductory program. We started the unit on nutrition and exercise this week.

Bible study
We didn’t finish very strong with “Character Building for Families” before our break. And then we moved the big bookshelf in the living room right before we started up again, and my Bible went temporarily missing. I found it today, though, so we got started on the “Gentleness” section.

Art
In theory we’re still using Mary Ann Kohl’s “Great Artists” books. In practice, I have a hard time making myself pull out the mess at the end of the week. Maybe I ought to move art day to Monday.

Physical education
Poppy had a blast doing “The Nutcracker,” and she’s signed up for the next soccer season.

Reading
Poppy’s taken on a couple of reading challenges, one of which requires her to read 20 minutes a day. I’m letting her choose whatever she’d like for her free reading. We’re reading longer chapter books aloud, a chapter a day over lunch. We started “A Little Princess” this week. Poppy asks me the meaning of every word she doesn’t know, and there are a lot of big words in this one. I’ve been reading it with a children’s dictionary by my side.

Geography
I downloaded Trail Guide to U.S. Geography from CurrClick, and I ordered a CD-ROM of maps and a children’s atlas, neither of which has arrived yet. So we haven’t actually started our geography lessons yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Even though one of the suggested activities for every state is making a salt dough map, which sounds suspiciously like a rather messy art project.

Science
The 1st Step Elementary Science I curriculum was also a CurrClick download, and it was so deeply discounted that I thought I’d give it a try. The theme is “measurements and tools,” and the kids were thrilled to get to run around with the tape measure yesterday. So I give it an A+ so far.

Math
I went ’round and ’round over the math curriculum. I was pretty well convinced* that I wanted to use Right Start math, but in the end it was just too much money. Instead, I bought Math Mammoth. It seems to work on more or less the same ideas as Right Start, but it doesn’t come with all of the geegaws and manipulatives. I did order an abacus, and it’s wherever that children’s atlas is. But we started it anyway, and it’s going well.

*In that post, I was also thinking about ordering the Nancy Larson science curriculum. I do still want to use it, but I’m going to wait a few years so Poppy and Pete can use it at the same time.

My little guys have been sick since Monday, so this week’s theme was Things That Didn’t Require Much Energy. Our “Five in a Row” book was “The Salamander Room,” and it was the first in quite awhile that Poppy was really enthusiastic about. It isn’t that she doesn’t enjoy the FIAR books anymore, but this one? She asked for it every day, several times a day. Since she was under the weather, though, we didn’t do many of the suggested activities.

(PS: A downside to homeschooling? No sick days unless you’re way sick.)

Poppy did a little bit of copy work this week — a line from the “Wonderpets” theme song, and the first stanza of Robert Frost’s “Dust of Snow,” which was also her memorization piece this week. We finished reading “Betsy-Tacy” (and Poppy immediately asked for the next book in the series, so I guess she liked it!), and Poppy read several books for her December BookIt challenge. I upped her page-number target to 200 this month, since she knocked out 100 pages so easily last month, and she’s about 60 pages away from the goal.

We finally got our DSL line up and running again, so Poppy was able to play some games at NickJr.com and PBSKids.com. (We switched to a Verizon MiFi last year, and it was woefully inadequate in terms of bandwidth availability. But the cancellation fee was astronomical, so we had to stick with it.) I also signed up for a free trial of Dreambox Learning, which is a web-based math curriculum. Poppy tried it yesterday and thought it was a blast. I don’t know that I’d use it exclusively, but it would be a nice supplement. It’s kind of expensive, though, and homeschools don’t qualify for their school discount unless there are 24 students. (To which I say: Why didn’t you just say “no discount for you, homeschoolers”? Well, I guess you could sign up as a co-op. But still.)

Anyway, I’d appreciate your prayers regarding this “viral crud” — that was the doctor’s diagnosis — that’s taken up residence in my house. Poppy is supposed to dance in “The Nutcracker” this week, and I’m not sure they’ll want a sick, hacking angel in their ranks. She’d be devastated. Petey hasn’t been able to fully shake the fever that accompanied his “crud,” and I’m coming down with it now, too. So far mine is just the stuffy/runny nose and the sore throat, but I’d really like it if that went away or at the very least didn’t get any worse.

What to know what other homeschoolers are doing? Here’s the Weekly Wrap-Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. I’m linking up there, and lots of other homeschoolers have, too.