It’s way past my usual Friday afternoon or Saturday morning collage/week-in-review post, but I enjoy writing these up so much that I’m going to go ahead with it even though the week is officially over. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in over my head this weekend with preparing items for not one but two consignment sales (children’s clothing and furniture/housewares), ferrying Lulu back and forth (and attending with her) a piano competition, and shaking my head in dismay getting really excited about the remodeling of our schoolroom which has to be accomplished before we get to the real remodeling projects: the dining room and family room. We had a really great week of learning, though, and I don’t want to forget it!
1. We’ve focused on art a bit more this week than we have been lately. I positively love art–everything about it, from the process of actually making art to studying the works of great artists to reading about it. I have one child who loves it as much as I, so this week I encouraged her to participate in Sketch Tuesday while her sister had a doctor’s appointment. 
Louise took her time drawing a picture of something that hums and coloring it with watercolor pencils. (We love these!)
2. I remembered 
to get out our art calendar and do a bit of art study. I got this week’s Sketch Tuesday. 
When I told her she was to draw something that might be found in a treasure chest, she decided almost immediately on a crown. I grabbed our Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History 
and found a picture for her to use as inspiration. Sketch Tuesday is such an easy way to inject these little bits of art into our week–I’m making a resolution to do it weekly! (Be sure to check out Tuesday’s slideshow to see all the treasures.) {I have no idea why #2 and #3 have run together. When I try to edit it, it looks correct on my screen. Computers! 
}
4. Math went much better this week than it did last week, praise the Lord! I think “easy does it” needs to be my motto when it comes to letting Lulu settle into a new mathematical operation. Too, RS C lessons 87-90 involved using manipulatives to do the multi-digit subtraction and not depending so much of mental math entirely. (This was really the hard part for Lulu–keeping the numbers straight in her mind when doing the subtraction mentally. I encourage her to persevere and work on increasing her capacity to remember the numbers without writing them down because I think it’s important that she improve at this. For the record, the problems she was doing mentally involved mostly two-digit numbers, and we played several card games during the week to work on this skill.) She caught on quickly to using the abacus to do this multi-digit subtraction and then to using symbols to represent the various places and to represent the trading. It was a great math week for us, which was very welcome after a couple of weeks of really struggling. (How could it be bad, when you get to do your math dressed in your favorite kimono? )
Louise and I worked through a couple of lessons in RS B together. We finally got to a lesson that involved using the part-whole circle. This is still mostly review for her, but she is really enjoying the one-on-one attention. (Oh, and she was very excited to finally get to do a worksheet this week. 
)
5. I could’ve entitled this post “Back in the Saddle Again with SotW”; this week we came full circle once again and started back using SotW volume 2 for our history. We left it way back in November when we started a unit of sorts about Native Americans (read about some of the resources we used here). After that it was Christmas and we went around the world again. After Christmas I tried out a hodgepodge of resources: Tapestry of Grace, Simply Charlotte Mason, doing my own thing. We’re pretty certain we’re joining a Classical Conversations community next year, so we’ll be back on the ancients again for that, so I was just discombobulated–should we continue on with our Middle Ages study, knowing that we’re backtracking next year? In the end, I decided just to go with it. Right now we need something simple and effective that doesn’t require me to do a lot of groundwork, so we stuck with reading chapter 11 (material we had actually already covered in other resources), doing a couple of notebooking pages, 
and reading Marguerite Makes a Book. Lulu and I work together on her narrations, but she has grown in the past couple of months to really wanting to do her own writing. Narrations are really the heart of what first drew me to the classical method, and I really, really like the idea of having ongoing notebooks that the girls can look back on to see what they’ve learned and how they’ve grown as writers.
6. The DLM has taken apart every puzzle that he could get his hands on this week. Oh, and he has climbed into and out of our new cabinets (and mashed his fingers in the doors of them, too). {More about the new cabinets in a bit. . . }
7. We went outside as often as we could this week. I even sent the girls outside one day before lunch to do a bit of nature study inspired by the March issue of the Handbook of Nature Study newsletter. The weather has been very spring-like in northwest Alabama–cool and windy, but pleasant. I have to note one thing that happened this week that has nothing to do with nature study but everything to do with this picture. Often when I send the girls outside, Lulu will take a book along to read. (While I can certainly appreciate this, I usually send her outside to actually get some exercise. ) In language this week, among other things we finished the list of prepositions that we’ve been working on memorizing. (When I saw we, I mean it very loosely.) Lulu had to complete this sentence to illustrate using the preposition with: “I like to play with ______.” When I asked her to fill in the blank, she sat still for a minute and responded, “Books.” Yep. In other language news, it happened that lessons 68-71 in FLL volume 2 dealt with writing a friendly letter. It worked out nicely that Lulu had just written a letter to her penpal, so we just incorporated that into our lessons. We were able to zip through lessons 68-72 this week, and we can see the end in sight!
8. Thursday night science was more about solutions and mixtures by way of earth science. Steady Eddie pulled out the big guns and showed the girls a bunch of different types of rocks discussed how they were formed. (That’s pumice floating in the glass there, in case you’re like me and don’t remember everything you learned in eighth grade earth science.) The pièce de résistance at the end of the lesson: a vial of volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens! 
The girls looked through loupes at all the rocks and the ash and noted which types of rocks are made of crystals and what size the crystals are. (Oh, and the rock candy we attempted to make a few weeks ago never “grew” the way it should’ve, but we did get some nice sugar crystals in the bottom of a couple of the glasses, so the girls also got to compare the size of these sugar crystals to salt crystals.) On Friday I read aloud Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens as a follow-up to our science lesson from Thursday night.
9. I have to mention this, though it really wasn’t a part of the official school week: Lulu earned a medal for participating in a local event called the Piano Olympics on Saturday. She played one song for a panel of judges and an audience, she took two written tests (theory and composers), and she completed two listening exercises in which she attended two short recitals and responded to all of the songs that were performed by circling descriptive words about each of the songs. We went back in the afternoon for an awards ceremony, and about twenty of the piano students were selected to perform in the honors recital. Most of the students chosen played more complicated pieces than Lulu is capable of playing yet, but it was a joy to listen to and watch these young pianists be recognized for their hard work and talent. Both girls practice the piano each day just after they do their morning chores and just before we begin with math. I hope that we can move from it being a duty to it being a delight (it hovers on the line most days) so that they can both grow into accomplished musicians.
Oh, we did other things, too: some reading, handwriting practice (the bane of my existence as a homeschooling mother!), spelling (only one lesson, alas), etc. We went out for errands and library runs on two days: Thursday and Friday. On Fun Friday we enjoyed free hot chocolate at the library’s coffee shop (all proceeds in this wonderful little cafe benefit the library!) thanks to our completion of the library’s winter reading program. We then walked over to the city’s art center to take in the art exhibited from a juried art competition for junior high and high school students. We saw everything from crayons melted on canvases to a gorgeous dress made of hundreds of strips of fabric and everything in between. It was a lovely way to spend the morning.
This week felt really good, the best we’ve had in a long, long time. Much of it depends on me and my being in a place of peace and contentment about what we’re doing. That’s why it’s so important for me to really know why we’re doing things, curriculum-wise. If I feel like it’s a waste of time or too something (hard, easy, whatever) for the girls, I’m not going to be at peace with what we’re doing. And now it’s time to start planning for next year.
I can’t not include a few shots of what we’re doing in the house. (All of these pictures are in-transition mess pictures, but you get the idea.) We’re moving the built-in bookcases that Steady Eddie made many years ago for our family room down into the school room, but not before he installs cabinets along the wall in the school room and paints them. For that to happen, all the books and the bookshelf had to be moved up into the kitchen. Yes, I have a full-to-overflowing bookcase in my kitchen. I guess it’s official now: we’re a homeschooling family.
