Work Plans for the Week of March 16: St. Patrick and the Bad Kitty

This week is Spring Break for our local public school system and university, and although we follow a year-round schedule and so will have our usual four days this week, the kids' weekend extracurriculars on both ends of the week are cancelled, and there are some fun public library programs during the day to attend, so I think it'll be a relaxing school week, overall.

Books of the day this week include Mandarin vocabulary, fictional books about the Lipizzaner (for Syd) and World War II (for Will), a book of horse stories for Will, and a couple of books on the periodic table, as they were in the same section as the books on crystals that I was pre-researching for Syd and they looked like something the kids would like.

MONDAY: I am SUPER excited about this Bad Kitty livestream that we'll be watching at 10:30! I re-checked out (because of course the kids have read them all before) all the Bad Kitty books from the library last week, and I was pleased to see that both kids read them all and are really into Bad Kitty again--they're going to be so excited!

Since it's Spring Break, our regular volunteer gig at the food pantry is probably going to be chaos. Just sayin'.

I'm not doing an extra math enrichment assignment for the kids this week, especially since we did so much celebration of Pi Day last week! In Math Mammoth, Will is reviewing decimals and then just practicing computation for ages, and Syd is in measurement, which thankfully has some hands-on suggestions included.

I downloaded a St. Patrick's Day unit study that looks cute--the kids make green flubber, and go on a green scavenger hunt, etc.--but I didn't think that the actual content was as cute as the cute stuff, so what we're actually going to do for this short study is listen to The Story of the World chapters on the coming of Christianity to Great Britain, read a biography of St. Patrick (Will tells me that the Wikipedia one is quite good), and, since our Pi(e) Feast was so much fun on Saturday, we might have a Green Feast on Tuesday before going to an Irish music concert that evening.

Syd finished her Pets badge last week by making a toy for a pet (she hand-sewed a stuffed fish and sewed it to a ribbon. The cats freakin' LOVE it), writing care notes for our cats (including the one that doesn't actually belong to us that we feed), researching how much food for each cat costs for a year, and watching a DVD on cat first aid. Will didn't do as much Girl Scouts-related last week, so I'm hoping that she'll be more inspired this week--it won't be long until they both bridge, after all, and then they'll have a whole new set of badges to earn!

TUESDAY: Neither kid did much work on their Science Fair project last week, so they're going to need to start buckling down this week. Syd is doing crystals, so she plans to research crystals, grow several types, and make 3D models of the various crystal shapes. Will is doing the Hexbug Nano, so she plans to figure out how it works, make a maze for it, and "hack" it in some way.

Syd has written several great short stories this year, so I'd like her to either write a new one or edit a recent one to submit to the PBS Kids Writer's Contest this week. I left Will's writing assignment open-ended, figuring that she will probably want to work on her blog.

WEDNESDAY: The kids have First Language Lessons today (one of these weeks I need to just start assigning it every single day until we finish it), and a Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson. They're still really enjoying Zoology for Kids, and although the Butterfly Life Cycle activity that I'm asking them to complete from the book is something that they've done before, it'll be a timely review for Spring!

There's a Minecraft program at the public library that afternoon, and so I imagine that the rest of our day will be spent there.

THURSDAY: I discovered last week, as the kids struggled with their Chinese class homework, that I need to encourage them to study the Chinese characters for their vocabulary words more. While they play on this BBC Languages site, hopefully I can scare up some flashcards online to print out for them.

The capitalization of "I" is a super-quick grammar lesson; I plan to explain that the pronoun "I" is always capitalized, no matter where in the sentence it is, and then ask each kid to write me five sentences in which "I" is not the first word. If I'm feeling extra mean, I'll make them write them in cursive!

Last week, the kids finished their family tree for their immediate family, including the cats and chickens, sigh. I want them to also include both sets of grandparents and their uncle, so they can do that this week.

Our Thursday afternoon homeschool playgroup has moved to the park, now that the weather's nice. If it's raining, though, there's another public library program that the kids can attend.

FRIDAY: I haven't figured out if the kids' math class will be held this week or not; if it is, I'll send the kids to it, since they missed last week, and then have our Free Day otherwise, but if it's cancelled for Spring Break, we'll probably spend the day at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and/or the Indianapolis Zoo. I'd like us to volunteer in the Paleo Prep Lab at the museum, but if the weather's great, the kids will also want to see the orangutans.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: No weekend extracurriculars mean no places that we have to be! Of course, I want to clean house and do yardwork, and Matt, I'm sure, wants to cook, but there's also some sort of salamander celebration at one of our state parks, so we'll probably do that instead.

Because salamanders beat yardwork. I mean, obviously.