Work Plans for the Week of March 17: Wild

Will's week of free schooling actually worked out wonderfully, with but a few reservations, the most important of which being her two-day tantrum when she realized bright and early on Saturday morning that the five days of math that I had been telling her would not complete themselves did not, in fact, complete themselves.

So that sucked, but the ordeal did prompt Will to ask me to remind her about her math as soon as I got up each morning so that she could do it. This morning I got up, reminded Will about her math, and glory be, she sat down and did it. Here's to four more days of that!

Will also did choose to join in on almost all of Syd's activities last week, playing multiplication games with us, taking her drawing lesson, listening to Story of the World and Pippi Longstocking, helping celebrate Girl Scout Week, etc. In turn, Syd joined in with much of Will's work--Will taught both herself and Syd how to geocache! They did that a LOT last week, and rode bikes, and played basketball, and worked on the bookshelf that they built for the food pantry where we volunteer. It was a busy and productive, happy and engaging week, and so I didn't stress when Syd and I didn't complete some assignments on her work plans--I just kept them on for this week!

MONDAY: One of my favorite podcasts, "A Way with Words," included a segment in a recent episode on the Pope's Latin tweets, so for Latin today we listened to that podcast while coloring, then looked at the tweets in Latin. Will spent much of the morning searching Zoo Tycoon forums and trying to figure out how to download and install user-created content (could this be her gateway into computer programming?), and we had a happy and useful shift at our volunteer gig, with the kids installing their bookshelf and setting up the book donations we solicited.

Currently, we're on our lunch break, during which the kids are being bottomless pits of bread and apples and oatmeal and cereal with milk, and then Syd and I (I'm betting Will won't be interested in this) are going to make a village of these cute multiplication houses, have a keyboard lesson, and write a letter to Pippi Longstocking, whose book we read AND whose play we saw last week:

I gave the kids Pippi hair before the play.

TUESDAY: We didn't get around to making the fossil casts on the couple of nice days last week, so I hope that we can do it this week. I want to take a nature hike and find real animal tracks to cast, and Will wants to organize a multi-cache geocache adventure--can we meet both of our goals at once? Time will tell.

The kids also didn't finish their Girl Scout Week activities last week (We did the movie marathon, comparing the animation of the first Toy Story to the later ones, and made cake and ice cream from scratch together, but missed most of the other required tasks), but they want that patch, so they agreed to make them up this week. We also didn't get the birdwatching session done, although we did learn to identify the black capped chickadee, but the birdfeeders around our property badly need a refill, so hopefully that will make the cut this week.

Both kids LOVE First Language Lessons. We did last week's lesson at the park; I wonder where we'll do this week's?

WEDNESDAY: We're in between horseback riding sessions, and Will crushed her thumb when a rock wall at the park partially collapsed on her, so she's out of aerial silks classes for a bit. That makes this day happily free, other than the Magic Tree House Club meeting which we MUST attend, since it's the last one of the month.

THURSDAY: The kids have a wildlife program at the library on this day--I hope they'll have some completed animal track casts to share! The nanosecond project is leftover from last week, although the pottery book is new. Math Mammoth is tooling right along--Syd's working on measurement this week, and Will's working through the last bit of multiplication that she can do before I sit her down next week and make her finish memorizing the multiplication table.

And I mean business this time. I printed out flash cards!

FRIDAY: Last Friday, we only completed math, history, and art, so those are the only new assignments here. Math class is on sabbatical for the week, so I'm looking forward to this extra hands-on math day to make something with Syd that I've been wanting for years--a skip counting board!

I did decide to just move on from the Bible story chapter in The Story of the World, so now we're onto Hammurabi. I don't know how long we'll stay here, either, since the kids already know him well--last Friday, over dinner, Will went into this long rant about Hammurabi and the whole "eye for an eye" business; she's convinced that a good judicial system has a much more nuanced system of justice than that. But this week, at least, we'll take another listen and do the quiz questions; if nothing else, we can at least do the map work on this one next week before moving on.

Drawing With Children should be fun this week; we're meant to look through magazines and catalogues and begin to develop a collection of images and graphics to copy and embellish to create our own art.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: I want to take a day trip to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, although we might do a fossils workshop at one of the local state parks, instead. Will has chess club. I have some shopping to do. And wouldn't it be nice to get started with the spring planting!