Weekly Wrap-Up - The Week Where Mom Finally Starts to RELAX

Today I'm linking up to Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, and Mama to 3 Blessings. I love seeing what everyone has accomplished during the week.

I'm looking forward to writing this week's weekly wrap-up, just because I'm proud of myself for relaxing with a lot of school matters. I started off the year with a bang - a great schedule, an organized schoolroom, and slowly I'm starting to see that it's OK to sometimes let my kids take the lead with their learning and deviate from the plan every now and then.

The biggest thing I have relaxed is our morning routine. We are still up and working by 8:30 or 9:00, but if the kids want to linger after breakfast that's ok - we have been putting birdseed out to watch birds off the back deck, and it's been cooler in the mornings now so they have been playing outside a little first thing.

Our week really started on Sunday, so here goes:

Sunday
After church and Sunday School we took the afternoon to just relax. The kids next door came over a for a while and I taught everyone some Chinese Jump Rope games. We are studying China and this was a fun way to learn about games from that country.

Monday

Monday was the first day of Miss B's Spanish class. She will take this 11 week conversational Spanish class. I'm very excited about it, and after the first class I could tell she was, too. They did EVERYTHING in Spanish and it was a very hands-on, active class as well. It gives me a little block of time alone with GMan while she is in class, too. We completed math and grammar lessons before Spanish class, and then finished up read-alouds in the afternoon. Miss B has tennis lessons on Monday evenings, so I enjoyed sitting at the court watching her and just decompressing from the day.

Tuesday

This week's Five In a Row story is "The Old Rag Coat". What a beautiful story it is, and it has been meaningful to my children. We curled up on the sofa and read the book underneath a grandmother's quilt which was made by my children's great grandmother. Notice the head, arms, and legs on the quilt. They have wanted to wrap up in the quilt whenever we do read-alouds this week. GMan colored Joseph's Coat of Many Colors quilt squares and learned four vocabulary words: murmur, protested, soot, embarassed The story takes place in the Appalachian mountains, so we listened to dulcimer music (there is a dulcimer in one of the story's illustrations) on YouTube. We talked about folk songs and folk instruments. Then, I introduced the children to Aaron Copland's music, Appalachian Spring.

Tuesday is also the day I give piano lessons in the afternoon/evening, so my husband picks the kids up and takes them to GMan's tball practice. They didn't get home until close to 8 p.m., so it was a late night!

Wednesday


We spent Wednesday working hard in the morning.... lots of math, grammar, spelling - you know, the basics. Anna is learning about mixed numbers, improper fractions, and ratios. GMan proudly finished the first book in his Horizons Math series. We also are reading The Burgess Animal Book for Children. While Miss B was working on some written work for the US Constitution, GMan colored animal pictures because he is making a notebook to go along with The Burgess Animal Book. I found lots of different sheets on the web. We also started talking about taxonomy and found this great guide for all of the animals in the book. This is such a beautiful read aloud for all ages!

We went swimming at the YMCA Wednesday afternoon and watching some more of "Wild China" when we got home. We are finishing China this week and I think we all hate to say goodbye.

Thursday

We may stop trying to do a lot of "formal" schoolwork on Thursdays, simply because we have co-op on Thursday afternoons. We did, however, manage to get a lot of good math practice in, along with our usual read-alouds. I have been enjoying some math drills I found at the Practical Pages called Math Rockets. GMan does simple addition and subtraction rockets, and Anna does multiplication rockets, and some larger number addition and subtraction. I timed them on each page, and then gave them time to color the rockets while we listened to some classical music.

Co-op was great... my kids are enjoying the company and they each have two classes they thoroughly enjoy.

Friday

Ok, this is the day when I really relaxed. I made sure the kids did grammar and math, then went through teaching them how to really clean their rooms.... then we sat down to watch more Wild China and called it a day. I think we crammed a lot into this week, don't you?

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Comments

[Marbel]

Sounds like a very good week! We loved Five in a Row. We still have fond memories of many of the books and we can't bear to give any of them away!

[Sherry]

I printed out some of the multiplication math rockets for Emme too, but we didn't get to them this week. They are really great for review!

Have a wonderful weekend,

Sherry

[Nikki]

It sounds like you all had a great week! I definitely want to check out the animal book you mentioned! Thanks for sharing! You have a lovely blog and I've enjoyed looking around!

[Kristenph]

It looks like you had a really great week! Thanks for visiting my blog :)

[amy2blessings]

Hi,
I'm following you from friday blog hop, hope you will follow me back. Check out my giveaway for a children's bible.
We home school to.
Have a blessed weekend.

[Jenni]

I love the suggestion of keeping co-op days more casual. We have co-op as well one morning a week, and I may try to keep that our fun, less strict day.
I love your blog as well very beautiful!
Jenni
http://www.ramseysathome.blogspot.com

[Sharla]

That's a lot of learning and activity for one week! It's inspiring to read through everyone's weekly wrap ups. Thanks for sharing!