Weekly Wrap Up ~ December Edition {with snow}

We’ve skipped a couple of weeks ~we’ve been “doing school”, I just haven’t “wrapped it up” here on my blog :)

We did take a short break in honor of Thanksgiving.  Since then we’ve been keeping up with the three “r”s but science and history have been put on hold until next year.  Instead we’ve been doing some fun advent and Christmas stuff.

Ds8 {3rd grade} ~

Reading ~ Ds8 has completed three more books from his reading list.  He finally finished More Stories from Grandma’s Attic {this took him two weeks}, Children from the Noisy Village, and The Toothpaste Millionaire.

Ds8 loves to read, give him a book about baseball and he’d read it until he finished it…even if it had 200 pages!  But assign him a book to read {even one from Sonlight’s reading list} and his face drops.  But he does his daily assigned reading without complaining, and he usually rates his “school” books pretty highly {I have him rate each book from 1 – 5 stars} :).

Grammar & Writing ~ He’s working steadily through First Language Lessons Level 3, he just finished a review of proper nouns and helping verbs and he’s working on memorizing “A Tragic Story” {which is a very funny poem, btw}.  He just finished week 15 in his Writing With Ease program.  I love that this program is so easy to implement.

Math ~ He is almost finished with another light unit in his CLE Math curriculum.  I think we can finish this light unit up before our Christmas break {we have one week left!}. 

Dd6 {1st grade} ~

Reading ~ My dd6 is flying though her All About Spelling lessons.  She just completed lesson #16, and she is almost finished with her first AAS reader, Runt Pig.  I have the next AAS reader sitting on the shelf waiting for her.

I recently wrote about why I love AAS so much…check it out if you’re interested in reading more about our experience with this spelling {and reading} program.

Grammar & Writing ~ Dd6 is almost halfway though FLL1 {which is pretty much review for her since she listened in when dd8 did FLL1&2 last year}.  Since she is still a beginning reader, she hasn’t started WWE1 just yet.  I am debating easing her into it after our Christmas break.

I have been copying some pages from our Explode the Code workbooks for dd6 to complete.  These worksheets are a great way to give dd6 some independent work to do while I work with ds8.

Math ~ She just took quiz #1 in her current CLE Math light unit book, so that means she is almost halfway through this light unit.  She’s been working on skip counting by 5s and counting nickels.  Next up is skip counting by 2s.

Family Subjects

History & Science ~ As I said at the beginning of this post, we are taking a break from history and science for the month of December.  We’ll resume both subjects in January. 

Advent & Christmas Fun ~ For the month of December, we’ve replaced history and science with some Advent and Christmas fun.  We are reading Ann Voskamp’s Jesse Tree Devotional along with Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Jesse Tree.  Ann Voskamp provides scripture passages in her Jesse Tree Devotional and McCaughrean’s Jesse Tree book provides a wonderful narrative story. 

There are times when these two resources do not match up perfectly, but it has been pretty easy to accommodate this.  The other day I read one of the devotional passages and two of McCaughrean’s chapters so that we would end up on “the same page”.  The divisions in both of these resources are short enough that sometimes doubling up is not difficult.

We are also reading Bartholomew’s Passage in the evening when dh is home.  We are loving this book just as much as we loved Jotham’s Journey {our advent storybook from last year}.

I have also been finding a ton of fun Christmas printables on the internet to keep my kiddos’ fingers busy.  If you are looking for some Christmas fun for your preschooler, be sure to check out the printables at 1+1+1=1, Confessions of a Homeschooler, and Totally Tots. 

In between all of the school stuff going on around here, we have also found time to put up and decorate our tree {it took us three days to get it all done}, watch some fun Christmas movies, sing a bunch of Christmas songs, and enjoy a couple mugs of hot chocolate. 

And just today we got our first snow of the season.  We’ve been having flurries almost every day for the past week, but today the snow actually laid on the ground.  It is not measurable at all, but the white stuff is all over the ground and the kiddos worked very hard shoveling a bunch of it into a bucket this morning :)

One more week until our Christmas break…yeah! 

This post is being linked to Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers