Work Plans for the Week of November 18

It's the last full week of schoolwork before Thanksgiving vacation!
MONDAY: For a change, after Project Week and just before our Thanksgiving vacation, we don't have a bookshelf bursting with library materials, so I had to think for a bit before assigning reading enrichment. Eventually, I settled on some realistic fiction for Will to read and write about (she normally chooses fantasy), and an early reading Mad Libs activity for Syd. I am already looking forward to getting rid of all of our early reading/phonics materials--I doubt we'll still need them by Spring!

Pattern blocks are still a hit--the girls are actually doing their pattern block activity right now, as we sit at the table together after dinner, since they preferred to play this afternoon after our volunteer gig instead of settling back down with schoolwork--and we're still all tooling along with Latin, and Will with the recorder. Syd's got the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner" down, but not the melody (JEESH, not the melody!), so I gave her a research project for this week's music, and we'll keep practicing the song for this week's memory work.

TUESDAY: This week's chemistry involves long-handled matches! The girls are already SUPER excited. Their math packets are taken from Math Mammoth--Will gets the cumulative reviews, and then a unit if she doesn't do well on the review, but Syd just gets a unit a day. Pretests for her are disastrous, because she hates being wrong more than anything else.

Syd and I are still doing First Language Lessons, but both girls are also memorizing the parts of speech, and we're going to do something different for grammar after Christmas. If I have to keep using the first two volumes of First Languages Lessons until we're done, I think my brain will die.

And yes, we ARE finally going to carve our pumpkins! Just, you know, for Thanksgiving, not Christmas.

WEDNESDAY: I am already looking forward to this free day, as I have some huge etsy orders to make. Gotta earn Christmas money, doncha know!

THURSDAY: I might rearrange Thursdays for a few weeks by shifting one of its assignments to Tuesday, since Tuesday horseback riding ends this week and won't resume until January. Our Thursdays are pretty light, but still overscheduled--sometimes we meet up with one of our homeschool groups, sometimes we go ice skating with them, and this week we're going bowling with them after a lunchtime playdate with another family. It's hard to work the formal learning into such a fun day!

Until then, however, Thursday means math, and grammar, and our next lesson in Drawing with Children, and the girls' special subjects--Syd is making more raisin bread, lord help us, and Will is researching and then playing with pendulums. I'm really excited about that last activity, because there are a lot of cool activities that you can do with pendulums, but some of them--the paint, the sand, etc.--may need to wait until next Spring.

FRIDAY: We're going to combine our study of math with our study of ancient history here, by reading about and then constructing geometric solids. I've had these Zome tools for almost a year now, and although we've done some cool projects with them, I'm going to make it my business to really learn this material and find more ways to incorporate it into our work.

A couple of Friday's assignments are secretly prep work for our big California trip next week. I'm going to show the girls how to make a scrap paper travel journal with pockets in it, and then making writing in it daily one of their work assignments during our trip, and we're going to start with the big facts about California, record them on our big kitchen map and start memorizing them, so that we can make a larger study of California when we return.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: There are a couple of fun activities on the schedule--chess club for Will, and the new Doctor Who episode for me--but mostly I'm going to be working my young ones all weekend. We're trying to avoid checking a bag on this flight so that we can save the checked bag fee (I'd rather have $40 in my pocket than a full week's wardrobe in California!), so there will be plenty of VERY careful packing, some house cleaning, chicken yard winterizing, chicken sitter briefing, maybe a little clothes shopping, etc.

And then we fly!