The Week in Review

I thought I'd sum up the last week, as I haven't had much time to write.

...so, last week Mane & I decided it was time to begin tackling "school" first thing in the morning. This means that we do math & reading right away. And then we move on to Story of the World and Five in a Row. It rubs against my philosophy a little, but I'm finding that we both need more structure, and I'm not sure how else to do it right now. I don't think I'd make a very successful "true" unschooler.

Anyway, Mane has been working through a book called, "100 Words Kids Need to Read by First Grade." This is fairly simple work. Mane knows about 75% of the words already. She needs something to be quick and successful right now, though, and this is doing the trick. The book has fun pictures and games. She also continues to work her way through the Bob books. I find her doing more incidental reading these days or signs and labels. It gives me hope that the reading is coming, albeit slowly.

For math Mane is nearly finished with lesson 21. I might even get her to finish it up today so that we can start the new school week fresh.

We've been reading about Egypt in Story of the World. Mane drew side by side maps of Africa and Egypt, and then she drew an arrow to show where Egypt is on the map of Africa. Her drawing skills continually amaze me. We looked up how to write her name in Hieroglyphs, too, and she copied that down off the computer screen. We've done a lot of talking about Egyptian gods & goddesses. I'm finding that, although I want to teach Mane to be gentle with people of differing belief systems, the idea of so many gods is just outright silly to her. It makes for some interesting conversation.

We've been reading from:



and...



On Tuesday we met up with the homeschooling group that we met way last fall. Mane had a great time, and we invited some people over to our house to watch birds with us in a few weeks. Looks like we're on our way to making some homeschool friends.

On Wednesday i had a friend over with her 2 year old, and she and Mane stood at the sink and washed dishes for about an hour. What fun! On Friday we had more friends over with all their little preschoolers. So, we had a fine week of socializing. I have a niggling feeling we didn't get enough "work" done, but, then again, the work can be made up and the socializing can't.