Week 13 Wrap, Week 14 Day 1.

Week 13 ended on a high note.  Monkey did very well across the board.  I was happy.  He was still sleeping like crud, though, so there was never any time to blog.  There was never any time to shower, much less blog.  Mercifully, Skeeve can keep an eye on a boy while I get wet - same is never the case for blogging.  It's all time full of "What'cha doin', Mommy?  What's that? Can I type letters, too? I wanna play too!" and nothing gets done.  Right now, I'm blogging during reading review in the hopes that it will keep him occupied long enough to get something done.

Reading:  Reading went well.  Monkey went through both long A words, and long I words.  I wanted to (and did!) review them with him in the beginning of week 14.  He retained fairly well, and while he does need occasional prompting on the silent e, once that's done he kind of goes "OH!" and gets everything pulled together.  I'm pretty cool with that.  Sight words are still hard going, but I suspect anything memorization-based will be.  He's not so good with memorizing things he doesn't see a need for.  His fluency is still behind, though that's fine.  He is reading the Thomas the Tank Engine phonics readers for his checks, and as they keep getting harder, I'm not expecting him to make huge strides.  He's sitting at an average of about 22 words per minute, which is low for his instructional level, but for his age it is phenomenal.  So I'll more than take it.

Math: Math went very easily.  As expected, he blew through the lessons with ease.  He is now capable of counting to 50 by ones and twos, and to 100 by 10s.  He also adds within ten.  Week 14 will be continuing to add, which I don't know about.  He may do very well, he may revolt against all the review.  No way to tell until we get there.

Logic: Logic, as usual, went quickly and easily.  I'm going to review this next week, just in case.  He understands what is being asked of him, but doesn't often have the focus to really work on it, so he half-assedly hands me whatever is in front of him.  We'll review, and I'm fairly certain he'll have a handle on it by the time it comes up in week 14.

History: History went spectacularly well.  He did his mapwork and his coloring pages and had a wonderful time of it.  He traced the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and stayed on the lines, which was impressive.  He also took pains to color the land green and the water blue.  I was fairly impressed, all told.  His narration isn't the best, but he can answer review questions, so we're working on it.  He'll get there eventually.

Science: We covered the life-sustaining properties of Earth.  How sunlight alone is not enough for life, and water is needed.  We currently have three pots of cress seeds around the house - one marked Venus, one marked Earth, and one marked Saturn.  Saturn lives in the freezer, the other two out in the yard.  We water Earth every day, and Monkey pointed out to me today that the seeds are growing in the Earth pot, but not the Venus one.  Skeeve will talk with him later about how that is, and why that happens - Skeeve is the science experiment guy.

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Week 15 will start French.  Week 14 is planned and underway.  As it's our Monday, today we only have Reading and Math.  Next week, we'll have French on this day as well.

I think Monkey's sleep will be better soon.  Last week he was having trouble with long I words, even after having gone over the silent e long A words. Today, I wanted to cover long O words.  He blasted through the review of long A and I, so I tried him out on the remaining lessons in the unit.  Sure enough, he was perfectly able to work his way through lessons 3 and 4 as well.  Tomorrow, instead of working on long O, he's going to be working on 'ee' and 'ea' combinations.  We'll see how it goes over and where we go from there.

Like I said with math, he'll either ace this week or hate it.  It's all reviewing how to add, and how to add with the abacus, or the tally sticks, or using them to make the numerals and adding with the numerals - along with the abacus and tally sticks.  The leap to just using the numerals will be interesting, but they're taking it nice and slow, so it's hard to say what will happen.

Fridays are always difficult.  We're just coming off our weekend, when Skeeve is home to allow nearly unlimited television time, and we're generally off our routine.  It'll be nice to get back to it, but until tomorrow, the "it's school-time" stuff tends to be met with "but I wanna watch SpiderMan and his Amazing Friends!!!" and another chat is had about needing to finish work before we play.  I have to laugh, though, as he'd be starting full day JK this year, where much more would be expected of him than one hour of activities - and I get the feeling a lot of people would give me crap about his having to "do school" every weekday, when it's a whopping hour to hour and a half in our house.  Versus six hours at JK.  Sheesh.