Update for the week of November 4, 2013

N. had another good week.  As depressing as I think modern times can be to study, he seems to like it.  It is the type of kid that does much better learning something if he has heard of it before so since he has heard of many of these wars and these rulers that could be why he likes it.

In history he learned about WWI and this is the first war that he ever found interesting.  We started reading War Horse for our story time and he can't wait to see what happens the next day.  Of course he also likes the fact that I keep ending up choked up by the time we finish our reading for the day. 

One of his biggest challenges this year has been doing the oral narration when I am supposed to type it.  I first tried letting him record it into his ipod and that was a disaster.  It was as if he had test anxiety.  He stuttered and stammered and got frustrated and went back to his habit of not giving many details.  So now I am typing while he narrates.  His narrations are much slower and methodical and lack much personality, but they are improved from the way we were doing them.  Right now he is looking back at the reading more than he should so I am encouraging him to look for names etc and then to look up and try and narrate.  It is funny because when he orally narrates the other weeks where I am not typing it he doesn't look at the book near as much and his narrations are better.

His history project this week was a salt painting.  Not sure it worked out exactly like it was supposed to, but he did get the paint to follow the salt line.

His nature journal assignment was to draw fall leaves of which we have plenty right now.  You might wonder about the blue leaf.  We do have a pear tree where the leaves are almost a red-purple in color right now.  I think that is what he was trying to capture.  He added more typing after I took this picture and I think he is finding he actually enjoys journaling, as long as he can type it.

For Science he had the option of making a periodic table pillowcase from fabric paint or playing the periodic table game we had learned last week.  There is no way either one of us would tackle that pillowcase so he played the game with his dad.

He is doing Teaching Textbooks Algebra and that is going well.  I know some people think it is light, but we are using the 2.0 version which is more challenging and I find it is going at just the right pace for him.  I do add in some additional story problems sometimes.