Week of 10/30

The big event this past week was the Reformation Celebration at church. This year's theme was the Huguenots, so we read Wings Like A Dove, a story about Jeanne d'Albret last week, to prepare. The story was pretty good, but focused on her life before she made her declaration to protestantism - the rest was mostly a postscript. Still, during the "sermon" part of the celebration the kids understood a bit more than they might have if we hadn't read it.

The day after Reformation celebration is always a bit slow, since we are recovering. But we progressed in all areas - the kids are slowly improving in their math facts, and reading, and writing. They are enjoying the Daily Grams practice and getting much better with punctuation, word usage (which was never much of a problem anyway), sentence combining.

Along with the math facts both kids are working in the Mathematical Reasoning books and J is just eating up the geometry part. I am always amazed at his visual/spatial abilities. E doesn't like it so much, nor is she as good at it. But she perseveres.

We are still reading a psalm a day, and are also reading a chapter of Mark each day. After Mark we will do Genesis, then tackle Isaiah.

Still reading the Swallows and Amazon series for pleasure.

For science, we are continuing with the BF history of science, now on the middle ages. We had previously read Fine Print, about Gutenburg and the press, but no one minds doing it again. We have slowed down a bit with "regular" history. J is reading The Landing of the Pilgrims and E is reading Mayflower Mystery or something like that, in support of American history, but SOTW has us taking a detour to Japan right now which is fine too. I don't place a lot of emphasis on non-western history at this point but they should know that things were going on in other parts of the world too.

Today we had a field trip to McMenamin's Edgefield Estate. Fun but not so great for the kids. A tour of the old building, which has some historical significance, then a brief tour of brewery and winemaking area. I think the wine area was most interesting. Funny thing for a kids' group.

My own reading continues in its desultory state. This morning I started some fun, light fiction: The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley, and I am going to go sit down with that right now.