Things seem to be settling down and we’re finding a rythym in our homeschool, which makes me very happy. 🙂 I love things to feel “normal”. 🙂 We accomplished quite a bit this week, learned some new things, practiced things we already knew, and discovered a couple new tools. I’m just going to share the highlights.
Math:
This week Hanna continued to work on her Pet Store which is part of her Your Business Math course. She also played Prodigy quite a bit, which seemed to focus on finding area and multiplying 2 digit numbers. She’s coming along with it, and not feeling so discouraged about multiplication ~ which is always a good thing.
Social Studies:
We had to do a little reframing around the Missouri Scavenger Hunt (again), which helped her get a little more excited about it. She finished the last piece this morning, which was a 5 sentence paragraph. We went over the different parts of a paragraph and she did a great job. <3 
We also kicked off our China study this week. Hanna is very interested in China, so we’re planning to make it part of our whole month. We’re still finding our feet with it, but we did check out some new books to help us get started, including The Story of Paper, The Story of Chopsticks, The Lost Horse, and The Butterfly’s Dream. I’m still on the hunt for more books we can use for our China exploration. I was also thrilled to find this fantastic blog with a bunch of ideas for China exploration. We also found some *hopefully* interesting shows on Amazon Prime. AND we are thrilled to see Anthony Bourdain is going to China for Parts Unknown this month. We’ve already got it marked on Playstation Vue to record it for us. 🙂
We had plans to study Jane Goodall this week, and didn’t get to it. 🙁 Sorry Jane.
Reading and ELA:
We read quite a bit this week, together and Hanna’s reading more and more on her own. <3
We read Rosie Revere Engineer, which was quite good, and a terrific way to bring up growth mindset, history, and rhyming. 🙂 I love those multipurpose books. We also read Junkyard Wonders, a fantastic book about being different and why that’s a great thing. Our Gracie Aunt was a touching book about two kids who loved their mom, but she couldn’t take care of them, and they went to stay with their Aunt Gracie. This book was well written, and brought me to tears. It touched on the feelings of guilt the kids had because they felt happy at their aunt’s home, but still loved their mom. All in all a great book and a great conversation starter.
Hanna finished up Dork Diaries book 2, and has started on book 3. She is also reading Charmed Life Hannah’s Bright Star ~ which is interesting because she doesn’t usually read anything with her name, especially when it’s spelled “wrong”. 😉 I’m pleased to see her reading more on her own, and enjoying it. She made me go to multiple libraries to find Dork Diaries book 3. <3
For ELA this week we read Harry the Dirty Dog. It was the “youngest” of the books included in our Living Lit program so far. However, it was a perfect book for introducing creating a timeline which it did.
We also studied sayings, idioms, metaphors and similes this week using There’s a Frog in My Throat. It is hilarious how many animal sayings you can bring into every conversation. 😀
Science:
We were excited to get our Groovy Labs in a Box this week. We jumped right in. We reviewed our Steve Spangler Science Club box this week, which was about electricity, turns out our Groovy Labs box was about electricity too. It was interesting the way the two boxes approached the topic and her reaction to them. I’ll be posting a head to head review soon.
We also did Mystery Science (I can’t say how much I love Mystery Science!!!). We discovered whether mountains last forever this week, with a very interesting experiment/activity with sugar cubes. Can you guess the answer?
Art and Creativity:
Hanna decided since she’s studying Mandarin I should be too, so she put together a Mini Mandarin Dictionary for me. She also made pop tarts for her American Girl Rosabell. She’s all about American Girl DIY she tells me. She did a lot of experimenting with the paint and other things to get them to look realistic. She also got very into puzzles this week, so much so we set up a whole new table in the living room so she had space to do puzzles.
Foreign Language:
Hanna’s still working on Mandarin. She’s been using Mango from the library to study. We also found the Written Chinese Dictionary app, which allows her to write words by tracing on the phone, it also has flashcards, including Chengyus which we are planning to use as a big part of our China exploration. 🙂 #win There is also an entire website that goes along with it. It’s a pretty exciting find this week. 🙂
Volunteer Work and Field Trips:
We didn’t take any field trips this week. We did volunteer at the Humane Society, as we do every week. We were sad to see one of our favorite dogs was back. It breaks our hearts when “forever” homes don’t end up being forever. Which leads to long conversations about why we can’t give every dog in the humane society a home. <3 We do love Sheila though, and hope to help her find a real forever home soon.
So that’s about it, a busy week, but we had a lot of fun, and did a lot of learning. We’re linked up over at the Weekly Wrap Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers. 🙂 What about you? How’d your week go? Tell us all about it in the comments. (If you’ve got a week in review post, feel free to share the link so we can stop by and check it out.)
