The days and weeks have blurred together – I’ve lost track! I haven’t been using my school planner, and we haven’t been doing our calendar time, and now I have no idea WHICH school week this is!
Crazy to think that in the past I never paid attention to the number of weeks, we just went from one day to the next and one week to the next, and I’ve have never fretted losing count. But this year I’ve been paying attention and so it feels *off* to have stopped paying attention long enough to lose count. I need to take a few days to organize our school things, catch up on my school planner and get back on track, I suppose.
A very large part of what we did last week revolved around setting up Christmas decorations, our Advent wreath, making the ornaments for and setting up our Jesse tree and starting a History of Christmas lapbook. Throughout the week, though, there were a lot of little milestones that I’d noticed while the kids were working. These are the things that I should be watching for more closely, noting, and hanging on to. These are the things that make the hard work worth it.
This week, Princess finished the 1st of the 4 discs that came with her Teaching Textbooks Math curriculum. Considering that we switched to Teaching Textbooks in mid-October, I am seriously impressed! And I’m very proud of how well she’s doing. Also, I’ve noticed significant improvement in Princess’ speed and accuracy with her multiplication facts!! I’m even more proud and impressed with this. =)
Drama Queen has improved with her addition facts, too, and next week’s lesson will be introducing multiplication! My how time flies.. More impressively, Drama Queen’s reading and spelling skills have improved noticeably over the past month or two. She’s been trying to read her older sister’s books for a while and I’ve let her go ahead with it on her own time. I’ve noticed that she’s reading her grade level books much more easily now and I think she’s starting to read her sister’s books well enough to comprehend and retain what she’s reading. (So I guess I’ll just let her keep reading them, then.) 😉
Little Prince has made some milestones, too. He’s been able to write his name for a while, but recently he’s begun trying to write out some words at the top of his drawings — normal stuff for a 5 yr old kid, but he has shown *no* interest in reading and writing up to this point and been content with drawing, drawing, drawing. He’s also starting to work with me a little on letter sounds and basic phonics. It’s exciting to see him start to take an interest in words.
It’s really nice to notice things like this in the middle of crazy, scatterbrained weeks! If I’m not careful, the rest of the month is likely to slip into that “crazy, scatterbrained” category, so I really intend to make a special effort to enjoy and celebrate our holidays without overplanning, overbooking, overcramming or overlooking anything. I think our routine is REALLY going to be important over the next few weeks!
Weekly Wrap Up is hosted by Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.
