Finally, a normal-ish week of school! (Well, as normal as we get, anyway.) It’s a good thing this week was pretty routine, because I’m fairly certain that it’s going to be crazy from now until the end of the year. Next week we start Thanksgiving school (although a much scaled back version), and after that, all bets are off!

We finally finished our Martin Luther workbooks. Two weeks later than I had planned, but better late than never, right? We also spent a little extra time this week learning about Martin of Tours and Martin Chemnitz, and why Chemnitz and Luther were given the name Martin. We also finally finished learning our Thanksgiving hymn (next week, we’ll start on Advent!), and continued to work on our Thankful Tree, which is really starting to fill out:

Turkey and Bunny’s long division is getting more complicated. To say they’re less than thrilled would be a giant understatement. Sometimes, they dawdle at it so long, our math lesson takes well over an hour. I don’t understand why they’d want to make something they don’t enjoy last longer, but they do. They both understand how to do it, too, which makes the whole thing even more puzzling to me. But, if they want to make one of their least-favorite activities take up so much of their school day, I guess that’s their decision! Ladybug has started working on subtraction…fortunately, there have been no complaints from her so far!

Ladybug also finished her first Explode the Code book for the year. This is very exciting to her! She couldn’t wait to take the post-test at the end of the book (she got everything right!). She also recently finished her first reader of the year…I like seeing how much pride she takes in her accomplishments!

We finally finished our unit on the moon in science. (This certainly has been a week of finally!) Ladybug has really been enjoying watching the moon, and figuring out what phase it’s in. We also made a telescope as our project for the moon lesson. It’s of course nowhere near as nice as our actual telescope, but it was fun for the children to see how a telescope works. Plus, this version is a lot more portable!

We continued to learn about ancient Greece in history, which is going nicely with our Greek myths study (which, sadly, doesn’t have too many lessons left). We learned about the writings of Homer and the ancient Olympic games, among other things. This is one of my favorite periods of ancient history to study, so this was a fun week for me, too!

In Scottish history, we finished the stories of Macbeth, Macduff, Malcolm, and Donald. I love the places in British and Scottish history where myth and fact have met…they make for such rich tales! I think I need to go back and read Macbeth, now…I haven’t read it since high school, and I’d like to experience it now that I’m more familiar with Scotland’s history. I think Bunny would like it if I would get the Shakespeare Can Be Fun! version, too…she really loved A Midsummer Night’s Dream!

For Thanksgiving school next week, we’ll just be replacing our ancient history and Scotland read-aloud with the Mayflower, Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, and American Thanksgiving traditions in general. I think I’m going to save our crafts for Thanksgiving week itself. This is definitely a more low-key unit than in previous years, but I have to save my energy for Christmas and then the Olympics!