We finished week 16 this week. For some reason the days went really long this week. N. wasn't goofing around or doing anything different. I think most of it was just the work load was a little heavier due to many days with 2 science lessons and also finishing up his personal essay.
He did finish up his personal essay this week. It was over 2 pages long and over 600 words. He wrote about an event that impacted his life. His writing has really improved over the years. In fact this week as we read a poor example of a paragraph in the EIW student book he laughed at it and was surprised when I told him that he wrote just like that 2 years ago. I then brought out an example to show him so he could see his progress. I think that pushed him to continue to improve. He still needs to work on changing up word order, but he is getting there. Here is a picture of his first page.
In World Geography he drew several maps, but I failed to get any pictures. He watched videos on Bhutan and read about Tibet. I love how this tied in perfectly with both the World Religion study and the Living Library. In the Living Library box we are reading "God Spoke Tibetan". In World Religions he is studying Buddhism. He did some graphic organizers for the different schools of thought for Buddhism. Later he had was excited that he was able to explain Nirvana to both his dad and sister. It's not often that he knows more about a topic than they do. He still needs to add some more details sometimes to his graphic organizer boxes.
In literature he is reading "Men of Iron" and was struggling to understand the book. Finally at chapter 12 I decided to let him listen to the Librivox recording while her read. This made a huge difference in his comprehension. It added time to his day but it was worth it. He did that for 2 days and then the Librivox website wouldn't work on the third day so he read it without the audio. He said it was much easier to understand because he could hear the readers voice in his head now and knew how the accent/dialect was supposed to sound. This is an adaptation he may need to use often in order to understand more challenging books.
He continues to love Teaching Textbooks Geometry. It is a very good fit for him. He also is now in a good place with The Art of Argument book for Logic.
He is almost half way through the year and I feel like he is exactly where I want him to be as far as his skills.
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