Homeschool Highlights: Week of Oct. 6

This week Kit went home with Auntie on Monday and spent two nights with her. She has been so excited to go and she asks so sweetly every time Auntie comes for a visit. And I love that she gets some quiet time there. 

Things here at home are very busy and usually fairly noisy, and we have regularly noticed how much calmer and more organized Kit is when the big kids are gone for a bit. We cannot change the fact that she has busy, often bossy siblings that are often a source of frustration and sometimes even anxiety for her, but she can periodically retreat to the quiet of Auntie's house now and again.  

While she was gone, we went swimming like usual on Tuesday, but it felt most unusual without her. 

We had fun though, especially the big kids who got much more Mommy and Daddy time, and especially loved the extra wrestling with Daddy time. 

The big kids each worked on language skills. Zak started a new program aimed at helping middle-schoolers become well rounded writers. He's made such huge progress with writing in the past year I felt he could handle a new challenge, but I let him know that he need not rush through it. He decided to add it to his schedule on Mondays and Fridays, and that works for me. 

Grace's language work right now is mostly done by reading the lesson and prompts and then she delivers her answers to me orally. The coordination, fine motor skills and connections between brain and body make manual writing an extremely challenging and frustrating task for Grace still, often ending in tears and an angry meltdown. To insist that she do it that way is simply not fair to her, because it is not out of stubbornness or laziness that she cannot perform this task. Her comprehension of the subject is well developed and her answers are complete and detailed. That is good enough for me. 

They also worked on geography. And we finished our chapter on Abel in Imitate Their Faith, which we had been neglecting reading for the last several weeks. 

Thursday was rough as Kit tried to transition back into home life after an especially rough first night back. She struggled severely with focus, and her little body couldn't be still for more than a minute or two at a time. There were many meltdowns, and bedtime was very rough, her bath not even seeming to sooth her overactive brain and body hardly at all. Thursday night again was difficult, with her waking frequently and not being able to settle back to sleep until the early morning hours. 

Friday was better. and she even asked to do math while the big kids did theirs. And she math she did! She insisted on doing pages toward the back of the book (aimed at students closer to kindergarten age), so I read her the instructions for each problem, and she blew me away, as usual, by following them exactly or solving them with only minor prompts from me. 

There was subtracting on several of the pages in story form and the only thing I did was read the steps for her and show her how to cover up the ones that were being eliminated, but she followed through by counting the remaining ones and finding the corresponding number at the bottom! Her attention span for academics is incredible. 

On Friday, our tablet, which had been on the fritz all week was finally working again. So the kids were very excited to be able to watch science videos. They watched several episodes of How It's Made, and then moved on to Popular Mechanics for Kids. Apparently, one of these videos was about airplanes and how their shape and design makes than more aerodynamic. Forty minutes later and at least a dozen different folding attempts, several paper airplanes were determined as suitable aircraft. 

The two below were the best and longest flyers. Grace smoothed out the turbulance by attaching paperclips in various places to find the best balance, finding a small one on the underside of the nose and a larger one secured at the back, just below the wings produced the longest flight with the highest altitude. Zak' s best flyer is shaped much like a stealth bomber, but skinnier. They had a lot of fun with this. 

I think we are going to do this again sometime soon and actually measure the distance flown and experiment even more with body designs. 

Not a bad week. How was yours? 

Check out other homeschoolers busy weeks at the Weekly Wrap-Up at wierdunsocializedhomeschoolers.com