This has been a crazy week at the Holman house. We have been dealing with no Internet, finally having cooler weather, making a trip to Oklahoma City, and adjusting/working with new school curriculum. But, we made it all work and have finished week 3.
As of noon yesterday, we had our Internet back again. Jason was working on a handyman job near the Internet tower that services us. He called me and said he watched the guys climb up the tower, switch out the box, and come right back down. Sure enough, we had Internet immediately. We did lose it briefly this morning, but we are hoping that it was a freak occurrence. I hope that we have truly reached the end of our Internet drought!
This past Tuesday, we finally got relief from our heat wave. We now have beautiful weather...80's in the day, 50's in the night. The windows are open letting in the cool fresh air, and the blankets are piled on at night to ward off the cold air the window fans are bringing in. It is wonderful! The only problem is that now we are not forced to stay inside because of the 105 degree heat, and we would much rather be outside than stuck in the house doing school work.
We did take off on Monday for a trip to Oklahoma City. OKC is our get away from home. While Stillwater is nice, there is not much to do here, so every once in a while we take off for a "trip to the city." We make our rounds to Target, Sam's, the mall, Toys R Us, and sometimes Aldi and then come home. There is not much in the way of shopping in Stillwater so heading off to a variety of stores is like an adventure to us! And...we have to have our Sam's Club pizza and a Coke fix every now and then. The funny thing is that there are a lot more things that we could do in OKC (museums, capitol, Frontier City, etc.), but we just need to see a Sam's and a Target, and we are good to go for a couple more months.
As far as our home school week, Savannah has moved up to the Saxon Math 87. The 76 was "boring" for her, and she asked me if she could move up. At first, I was hesitant because she was making so many "silly" mistakes on the math pages that I was wondering if she was ready. We decided to give it a shot, and sure enough...she is doing much better. She was just bored with all the repeat knowledge and was making careless errors. Even though she is doing much of the same things, this new book is moving much faster and covering more in one lesson than the other book. Next week, we will have a few more lessons of review and hopefully get into some new stuff!
I am also looking into changing up JJ's grammar. The Primary Language Lessons that we have is a little too intense right now, so we are going to back off. We started the year at lesson 50 which is where we left off last year, but I decided to put it off a couple of weeks and do more review of basic sentence structure, main idea and details in paragraphs, nouns/verbs/adjectives, etc. The Primary Language Lessons book does not really do much to actively teach/reinforce basic grammar.
We started today with some games online that deal with sentence structure. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be using some of the activities at www.internet4classrooms.com. This is a great site that offers a variety of activities for each grade level. It has direct links to games and "lessons" that deal with various subject content on the level of your choice. Today, we played "Grammar Blast." I am also starting JJ in the Book 2 writing curriculum that moves into the cursive writing. I think he is ready to jump into the cursive, and he is looking forward to it so we are going to give it a shot.
The Story of the World history book is GREAT! I would highly recommend it to anyone that is ready to start history with their elementary children. It is a great curriculum that follows through like a story. We completed chapter 1 this week. We learned about the shaduf, the fertile crescent, and what the Nomads were. We also finished up our study of archeology. Next week, we have a couple of activities that we will be doing to reinforce some of the nomad ideas, and then we will move on to chapter 2. The kids look forward to it each day, and we sit down together and have time to discuss and enjoy learning together.
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