Week 20: Jan 11-15

....and the illness continues.  Daddy stayed home from work for three days per doctors orders for pneumonia.  He went back to work today but is only working part of the day.  I worry about him because he has a history of pneumonia and asthma.  The doctor told him on Monday that he would have ended up in the hospital, had he not gone to see her that day.

It was weird having him home.  Usually he is only off work on the weekends and so we don't do any schoolwork those two days.  It was hard to get moving every day this week because it felt like a weekend!

We were suppose to go to a bowling party with our homeschool group, but Drake had a bit of fever and Gabriel and I were still coughing.  I did not want to pass on those horrible germs we've been dealing with these past two weeks!!  The boys were upset but Daddy promised to take us all bowling as soon as he is feeling better! 

I sat down and mapped out our next semester.  Nathan should finish Math 65 in early April and start Math 76 after our April 19-23 spring break.  I was hoping he would be further along by now but we took some extra time to review those pesky fractions.  Still he is doing very well right now, conquering decimals.  He is on track to finish R&S English by the second week of May, and we'll take a nice break before moving on.  We will finish up Apologia Astronomy in just a few short weeks.  We are going to take a small break to learn about airplanes per Kaleb's request.  Then we will pick back up with Apologia Botany.  We are behind in MOH but should still finish by June.  Kaleb has moved into ETC book 2 and will finish it in May.  OPGTR will be an on-going subject through the summer and possibly fall.  He should finish up Math 1 by June and be ready to move into Math 2 in July.

That's the plan anyway....and we all know how quickly plans change!  :)  I feel better having the plan though and hopefully we can stick to it or at least as close as possible.

I spent the weekend getting our astronomy and MOH notebooks updated.  The boys spent this week (instead of the *planned* last week) working on lapbooking/notebooking pages in the notebooks.  I LOVE the astronomy notebook!!  I just have to share some pictures!

I thought I would share a few pictures of our Apologia notebook pages.

I love the lapbook mini-books.  Nathan does NOT like lapbooking.  However, I have yet to find something that keeps his attention and helps him remember so well.  Those little mini-books do the job while worksheets do not.  Instead of making a lapbook for each chapter, I just put the each chapter's mini-books on a sheets of construction paper cut down to fit in our notebook. These lapbook mini-books came from the Notebooking2Learn yahoo group.

The book I have open is a vocab book.  I love these!!  There is one for each chapter.

I also keep their drawings in the notebook.  How fun will it be to look at these when they are older? Here are a few of my faves.



We do narration everyday and add that to our notebooks.  As well as the quizzes and any other related materials.

I have taken pictures of our experiments and non-paper craft activities, and plan to print them to add to the notebooks as well.

I found chapter quizzes on the Apologia yahoo group.

I also found these cute printables in the Apologia yahoo group files.

I saw this fun little color experiment on Susana's blog.  Super easy and my boys LOVED it!

Kaleb enjoyed this week's ABC I Believe lesson.  You can read about it and see pictures *HERE* on Gabriel's preschool post.

Here are a few random pictures of Nathan and Kaleb this week.

Both did well on their schoolwork even though Daddy was a HUGE distraction.   We have a little catch-up to do next week, but it won't be a problem.  Besides Daddy being sick and missing the bowling party, we had a really good week!!

Gabriel's preschool post is here if you would like to read it!!