France

The FIAR theme for this week was France. We read Madeline (again, from our aborted attempt last week) along with That Glorious Flight. Both are set in France, although TGF includes a trip to England. We looked up France on the map, made a French flag (out of paper), listened to French children's songs, checked out some new vocabulary (from Madeline - appendix, solemn, disaster; from TGF - "clacketa" which is a sound made by an air vehicle in the book), talked about the process of invention ("try, try again"), learned about roman numerals, and discussed how 12 girls can be grouped in different ways. We also watched the movie version of Madeline, which we discovered was very different from the book. It was a very full week! Jimmy liked reading the two very different books together, but I'd rather try to avoid that in the future for, if nothing else, the sanity of the teacher. =)

Our letter work this week was also combined. We tackled T & U. This worked pretty well, actually - we were able to practice both letters in several words, like "cut" and "tuck." The Bible verses associated with these letters were blessedly short, or we wouldn't have been able to memorize both. Yay!

Math went really well. We played War (Jimmy loooooves it!), added the jack, queen, & king to the game, made an ABBC pattern with our pattern blocks, and introduced tangrams. We had a math test mid-week, where Jimmy was asked to count by 1's to 100 (or beyond) and by 10's to 100. He did fabulously on the 10's, but he had a few stumbles on the 1's. Mostly, he was just having trouble focusing on what he had already counted. We're going to have to work on this a little more so it comes more naturally to him. I also learned that I had forgotten to teach him what to do once you reach 100 - he didn't know what the next number was! Good thing for these little assessments!

Our other little school asides this week were art (Jimmy used regular paints for the first time, making somewhat of a mess because Mommy wasn't *quite* paying attention) & German school. Jimmy really loves his German school. I am so thankful that we have had this opportunity. (Did I mention earlier that we won a free scholarship from a raffle we entered in December?)