This week was pretty relaxed, but we still accomplished quite a bit. Our FIAR book from last week was Who Owns the Sun? We're spending this week expanding on the slavery theme introduced there. I found 3 more age-approapriate books on slavery. We won't row them (rowing a book means reading it every day for 5 days & doing a different activity each day to re-enforce a specific topic). For 3 of the days this week, Jimmy gets to choose one of the books to read together. His first choice was Aunt Harriet's underground railroad in the sky by Faith Ringgold. Today, he chose Fredrick Douglass: the last day of slavery by William Miller. Tomorrow, we'll read our last book, Nettie's trip south by Ann Warren Turner. Along with the books describing a little of what slavery was like, we got a music CD from the library of songs from the Civil War era. Some of them are war songs, but there are several slave songs, such as Follow the Drinking Gourd. We listened to the CD a little today as background music, and I think we'll listen to it again tomorrow.
Our letter this week is R. Jimmy memorized the Bible verse pretty well, and even read it a little early in the week before he had it memorized. Pretty impressive, since the verse is "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Exodus 20:8" - those are some pretty big words. He's been doing a great job writing, too. I demonstrated writing R and r on Tuesday, and he's done it all on his own since then. I tried something new today. I gave him a word to write ("car") without telling him how it was spelled. We sounded it out together to figure out what letters are in the word. I think he enjoyed the exercise. Might be a good idea to help him learn to read, too.
On the math front, Jimmy was very excited to find out that we're using the geoboard again. We started out the week with a test on ordinal positions. Jimmy passed with flying colors. We are all caught up with tests now, too - he passed all of the tests where he previously had difficulty. We'll have our next test first thing next week. Yesterday's lesson was on relative length - which is longest, which is shortest, put these in height order, etc. Jimmy was disappointed that our lessons are so short. I'm going to have to review next year's curriculum. If it's not long enough, I might want to consider combining lessons. Anyway, back to this week's work. As I said before, we're using the geoboards again. Today's lesson was copying patterns from a paper drawing of goebands on a geoboard. There were 4 different sets to copy, each a little more complicated than the one before. Jimmy did very well, but he had a little trouble with the last pattern. I am learning to not treat each lesson as a test, but to gently show Jimmy where he is making mistakes & how to avoid them. Tomorrow will be more geoboard work. I think it's the same "copy the pattern" stuff, which Jimmy will undoubtedly love.
On Saturday, Jimmy will attend his 4th German Language School class. They are having Fasching, which is a Carnival type thing (you know, Faschnaucht, Mardi Gras, etc). Should be interesting! Which reminds me, time to find a costume for Jimmy. I think I'm supposed to wear one, too. Harumph!
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