Weekly Report 38

The Final Week or How Much Can We Possibly Fit into 6 Days?

I can’t believe how busy we were this week.  It didn’t look too bad at the outset, but it has turned into one of the most tiring, although really good, weeks we’ve had this entire year.  I’m actually quite glad we weren’t in a position to finish up most of our books so we just did what we could, didn’t worry about what we didn’t do, and concentrated on having fun above all and finishing up every last activity we had for Roman history, culminating in our Roman feast (which deserves and will get an entire post of its own.) 

I’ll start with the activities.  I’ve already posted about going to the pioneer village on Monday.  On Tuesday after my cello student left, we waited around all afternoon for our Rainbow Resource box to be delivered by UPS.  But we finally had to give up and leave for Grandma and Poppa’s house where I had a scholarship committee meeting then we stayed overnight.  Wednesday morning I had more lessons, then we went to visit Sonja and her family.  We had originally planned to do our outdoor hour challenge walk with them, but we didn’t quite get around to it and just played instead before deciding to meet up again at the zoo that evening where we again had lots of fun together.  It’s so nice to have good friends to associate with.   

Thursday, we went to a friend’s birthday party at a different kind of zoo, the Kangaroo Zoo, which is basically a warehouse full of those inflatable playsets you see at carnivals.  It was crazy trying to keep track of all three boys, but they all had a great time bouncing, climbing, and sliding.    

On Friday we had park day with our homeschool group.  We go to a different park every other Friday and this one had a river to explore.  It was a lot of fun. 

Yesterday morning we got up early for the flag day program at the church, went to the farmer’s market, did some more shopping, and then prepared for our feast.  We didn’t have quiet time a single day this week and I can really tell.  I’m so tired!!  Tomorrow’s definitely going to be an unwind day. 

Oh yes, we did some schoolwork in there too.  A completed four grammar lessons and did the June Primary theme for copywork.  He also did math lessons 44-52.  Ten lessons to go, we’ll probably finish them up when we talk about airplanes in a few weeks.

And we never did finish our outdoor hour challenge even though we were outdoors a lot.  Oh well.  C wanted to add tarantulas to our insect mural so we finished that up, although we didn’t read a single science book this week.

C is really close to finishing his handwriting book.

Then there was history.  We read a lot this week, mainly from Inside Ancient Rome and our Learning Through History magazine.  A also read Detectives in Togas this week and really enjoyed it.  Now I need to hunt down the sequel. 

We read SOTW chapters 41 and 42, and did the mapwork.  A also colored Boadicea.

D colored his Boadicea, and C colored a world map, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, a Visigoth Invader, and drew himself in the Triumphal Arch from the history pocket.  He feels compelled to color everything I have whether we talked about it this week or 6 weeks ago.

A completed the Ancient Rome history pocket which included a laurel wreath, puppets, vocabulary (which he insisted he could complete on his own and not have to narrate to me), a postcard (which he also wrote completely by himself), and a drawing of himself coming home from battle through the triumphal arch. 

We also had fun experimenting with catapults. (And I’m still finding the mini marshmallows they flung all over my kitchen!)

And they had to reassemble Roman pottery destroyed in the Visigoth raid. 

I ended up reassembling C’s pot, which actually wasn’t too bad as it was in much larger pieces than A’s.  I so enjoyed smashing them with the rolling pin in the first place.  It was strangely satisfying.  A enjoyed putting his back together although we had a few pieces left over that just didn’t seem to fit anywhere.  We’re sure real archaeologists never have that problem! 

Details on the Feast to come. . .

And that’s it!  The end.  We survived first grade.