Parenthood - 2020-05-22 Homeschool wk may 19-22

May 22, 2020

We took this week quite a bit easier than the last couple of weeks, and consequently Elizabeth did not finish all of her assigned work.

We also did not do much in the way of formal art lessons, but we did spend some time talking about Mount St Helens, which erupted forty years ago this week. It happens that Auntie Mary was actually in Portland at the time so we heard about her experiences and saw some of her pictures. She even has some ash, which they had to shovel off their properties like snow! She's going to show us in person when we go visit her next.

We planted our garden and since the kids are all responsible for looking after their own plots this year a chunk of the week was spent looking after plants.

Matthew and Elizabeth also continued working on their fire project and actually managed to burn quite a few holes in leaves. They can reliably get smoke in leaves now, but have only managed to get a real ember a couple of times. Flames were spied, but accidentally blown out. They haven't been allowed to spend as much time out in the sun this week after the boys all picked up rather intense sunburns over the weekend though. Instead they've played on the swing and in the sandbox which has the advantage of being in the shade!

We've had a few classes outside as well, which is always fun.

Amelia's school asked them to try doing jump rope, so we spent an afternoon trying to teach her how to use a skipping rope. She can't reliably manage by herself but she DID actually learn how to jump over a rope that others are swinging and has made it up to 5 jumps.

We did a science experiment suggested by the school as well with pepper and water, along with our old favourite rainbow milk. We slacked off a bit on music practice.

Elizabeth has book club this coming weekend so she needed lots of time to finish her book. She completed many activities in netmath. She did some activities for her class. She avoided writing her recit.

Matthew had a recit to write as well, which he put off working on every day until Friday. He definitely much prefers to work on math! He also helped Amelia with as much of her work as possible, especially when she got to listen to books on the computer. He thinks he's getting away with something but although I don't count this towards his schoolwork he is still working on his french language and reading skills :) Again this week no classmates came to help practice his french, although I did manage to connect him with a friend and they practiced a bit. I'd say our efforts to speak french this week needed improvement.

In addition to lots of reading, Amelia made a craft with her class which she then played with all week. She made a mask with the leftover bits of her "bricolage". They also played in their cardboard box fort quite a bit.

Overall it was a fun week.