Over the Weekend

Since it was a three day weekend I wanted to do a bit of school, using some of the time that I would be home from work so we could do things at a slower more relaxed pace. Zoey did a scheduled day of school work which consisted of math, geography reading (and continuing on working on her landform glossary), science (in which she finished up on learning about cells and is moving into DNA and genes). For science she took a bit of a rabbit trail after reading about the bubble boy in her science magazine from Discover Kids and did a bit of her own research on his story. It was kind of strange telling her that I recalled seeing him on the news when I was young. For language arts she continued with her reading of A Wrinkle in Time (we're actually reading it together) and she worked on her dictation passage which was this...

For her first stab at it she only had two errors, she misspelled doesn't and added an additional set of quotation marks (after look and before Charles in the second sentence). This is our first time working with dictations so we're both learning how to go about it. So far our strategy is that I write the passage from the book on the chalkboard so she can look at it, (this, after reading it already in her book) and we talk about any special punctuation, capitalization, spellings, sentence structure, etc. and then I erase it. I then read the passage to her and she copies it into her dictation notebook. We then go over it and correct anything that may need correcting. We will then try it again (if needed) the following day. The next day we will move on to the next passage. 

Here she is researching some landforms for her landform glossary...

And reading from her World Religions book...

She accomplished getting most of her school work done on Sunday so was hoping to have a friend over on Monday (since it was Labor Day) but she ended up with a sore throat and feeling kind of crummy so we got out a Lego set and she worked on putting that together instead. 

 It was a pretty low key weekend. Rainy too, so it was good to just hang out around the house.

The completed Lego set! It took just over an hour to assemble and lots of patience! :)

Yesterday marked our first day of homeschooling on a day that I'm scheduled to go in to work at the library. For some reason I was nervous about this as I wasn't sure we'd be able to swing it and have things go smoothly. We actually were pretty efficient! Zoey got most of her school work done at home before I had to go into work and then she came in for a bit to the library with me and watched some videos on cell structure and DNA and then played a couple of games relating to the same on the computer as well. She even got to meet up with a friend for a bit at the library too before coming home.

Here she is doing yoga at home before coming in to the library with me. She really is enjoying the DVD Shanti Generation: Yoga Skills for Youth Peacemakers.

Our first day of school and work was a success!