After our fun trip to Chicago, it was a little difficult to get back to work, but we pressed on. Turkey and Bunny made quite a bit of progress in The Scarlet Letter…and have already pretty much figured out how it’s going to end. They learned about medieval Japan in history. They worked on diagramming sentences with infinitive phrases in grammar. They also finished up the chapter on stoichiometry in chemistry. In math, they began to work on everyone’s favorite kind of distance problems…you know, the ones that begin “If a train left New York traveling 75 mph at the same time a train left Chicago traveling 50 mph…” This quote from Star Trek: Enterprise says it all…and I think made them feel a little better, knowing that even the ship’s chief engineer shared their feelings about these kinds of problems:

“A train leaves New York at three a.m. heading west, while another leaves Chicago at four thirty heading east. I never could figure those out.” Connor Trinneer as Commander Trip Tucker on Star Trek: Enterprise

Ladybug has made it about halfway through her study of King of the Wind. In science, she learned what kind of food is good for horses, what’s bad, and what is poisonous. In history, she read about Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible. Her math lessons focused on the metric system.

Chickadee learned how to read words beginning with “qu” last week. Her handwriting is really improving! In math, she learned the names of some shapes that, while familiar, she hadn’t identified by name before. She’s really enjoying reading about Mabel and Sarah Jane’s high school experience in Away from Home.

This is the time of year when the school year gets kind of long. Hopefully, I’ll come up with some fun activities to break up some of the monotony that always seems to accompany the arrival of February!