This Week

As my online English class has heated up, my posting on other blogs has slowed down considerably. There's only so much time in a day, and I have only so much energy to devote to blogging right now. But here's a quick synopsis of what we're doing this week:

Epiphany:
*Latin at the college (I know she had a quiz today)
*reading Beowulf for English
*still filling in gaps in history, reading and listening to Teaching Company lectures about late antiquity, but also dealing with Anglo-Saxon England
*reading Galileo's Daughter for science this week; we'll go back to the textbook soon, however
*reading P.G. Wodehouse for fun (great way to absorb prose style, too)
*running (we'll call that P.E.)
*cooking dinner (home ec)
*following the presidential election (government)

Amicus:
*we'll start Latin at church tomorrow after the noon Mass
*diagramming simple sentences with adjectives and articles, including sentences of his own composition
*division with 2-digit quotients and remainders
*today, a chapter on propaganda in his Fallacy Detective book, which sent him down an election-campaign rabbit trail: he's been looking up websites for both major presidential candidates to try to discern where each side is using propaganda to advance its agenda (I told him he HAD to look at both sides, rather than concluding that ONE side was dealing in propaganda while the other was being unambiguously aboveboard)
*more note-taking on elements in the periodic table -- we're in the fourth latitude now
*lots of reading -- lowbrow stuff like Star Wars novels, middlebrow stuff like Redwall, and, um . . . I guess nothing all that highbrow right now, that I can think of.

He also does morning prayers and Church history with Helier and Crispina and me.

Helier and Crispina:
*a chapter a day in Great Moments in Catholic History
*reading about saints on their days (today: St. Robert Bellarmine) in Fr. Lovasik's Picture Book of Saints
*reading about fish in Usborne Pocket Nature
*just got through reading two Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; now reading Betsy and the Boys by Carolyn Haywood
*Crispina is doing lots of coloring and writing (mostly her name)
*I'm having Helier do some light "buddy-reading" with me, in books like The Cat in the Hat

We've also played more Boggle and also Monopoly -- I recall that at Helier's age, Amicus learned a lot of addition facts by rolling dice in Monopoly. If ever there were a game rife with math manipulatives . . .

And we've walked to the Farmers' Market and talked to the farmers, who by now all know that Amicus, Helier and Crispina are homeschooled, and that's why they're at the Farmers' Market at eight on a Tuesday morning, instead of in school.