Week in review for Septermber 8-12, 2014

We finished week 4 of the World Geography guide-so hard to believe we have been at school for a month already.  Overall this week was the smoothest yet. 

In science he is enjoying the study, and I think learning quite a bit.  The days with 2 lessons do make for long days though and I am having to challenge him to not slack off when he gets to the last page of questions.  For science labs there is no way he can do them independently due to his hand tremors.  What works best is if he does them that night or the night before with his dad.  He doesn't mind this because, although he has to do work at night, his day ends up shorter.

He is really enjoying the World Religions and Cultures Study.  We have neighbors that are Hindu so he was pretty interested in the reading he did this week about the Hindu religion.  I am very glad that I made notebook page templates for him because then he can type right on the charts and glue them in.

In World Geography he made a cuneiform map.  He made his wedges too big so he was laughing at how few things he could fit on his map. 

He did 2 drawings this week, the Nile River, and Greece.  He likes the drawings.  He doesn't love the video instruction because he says she doesn't get excited enough.  I think years of listening to Diana Waring has spoiled him.

The one bump in the road for him right now is written narrations for history.  He has taken several steps backwards in the quality of his narrations.  I am not sure why.  He is using very few descriptive words and even though they are 3 paragraphs long they are only around 10 sentences.  We had a long talk this week about it and about the difference between trying, trying hard and giving our best effort.  After giving a visual demonstration of this for him he seems to understand and hopefully this week will do better.  The goal is to just see progress in that direction.  I have a feeling this make take a few months to get him back to nicer narrations. 

He is really enjoying A Christmas Carol and his written narration for this was better and did have more description in it.  He has never done a written narration from a literature book so I was pleased with his first effort.

The only other subject he is struggling with is Logic.  I started a notebook of the fallacies for him and now I am encouraging him to continue writing them down as he learns them.  This seemed to help when he did the exercises this week.