This Week So Far (Posting on Thursday Night)

We've had a couple of busy days where something else took precedent over attempting a normal day of school.

Sunday night Ria attended a talk on stem cells ethics by Fr. Ted Pacholczyk.

Monday was simply a day off of school. We had friends over and watched Ben Hur.

We did some school on Tuesday, but had a special emphasis of listening to sacred music on CD (and on the Internet) because I was preparing for a Sacred Music workshop that night for parents in our homeschool group. Ria and Gus helped me prepare for the meeting (getting materials together and such) and attended the meeting with me.

Wednesday we accomplished some basics and had Irish dance class in the afternoon. We also made maple syrup from our own maple tree!!!

Today was finally a more typical day with time for Math AND read-alouds. We finished Through the Looking Glass, read the maple syrup chapters from Little House in the Big Woods and read from Celtic Heritage Saints (Saint Columbanus, which caused a great deal of excitement since we read Fingal's Quest earlier this year) and a chapter of My Path to Heaven. We also spent a lot of time outside as the weather was about 52 degrees and sunny!!! Tonight we had our catechism class. We watched the first half of Common Ground (which my kids had already seen) and stopped to discuss parts of it along the way. Gus and I finally finished stage 7 of Cambridge. Terri worked on Latina Christiana. Bernie and Ria practiced recorder together (after we finally found Bernie's recorder book which had been missing for nearly 2 weeks!).

Other things we worked on this week: Ria's been researching a paper topic for her co-op class for a persuasive essay on her chosen topic - why children need to be challenged academically. She's reading Cardinal Newman's prequel to Fabiola, entitled Calista. She's doing some review work on fractions and pre-algebra as there are some operations that are bogging her down.

Gus is still working on his Stations of the Cross. He finished listening to Song of Roland.

Kate has been playing with some new refrigerator magnet words in the hopes that she'll get more interested in letters and reading. She's enjoying her Math book as always.

Everyone's been playing lots of Blokus and doing art and listening to audio books as always.