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The new year has been very good to us from a school standpoint. For some reason, however, Fridays seem to be the day of resistance from my pupils so far.

K has officially completed her faux standardized reading test. (The results for part 2 will be revealed in a different post.) We will continue with the McRuffy grammar lessons, which are still moving along quite nicely. She seems to like those, so she has been doing more than one page per day.

The new spelling has been working out extremely well. Not once has K given me any problems over it. We have gotten through the first eight lessons, and starting tomorrow she will be “tested” on 25 words each day. Some of the words on the lists from the last two weeks have been spinning, begins, we, wee, be, bee, inn, inning, beginning, beginner, agrees, agreed, agreeing, disagrees, disagreed, and disagreeing. So far, the only “problem” I’ve noticed is that each new day she seems to forget that the n gets doubled when adding a suffix to an –in word. But I guess that’s what review and repetition are for.

Writing With Ease lessons are finally going well. I was a bit concerned in the beginning, as K seemed resistant to the process, but now she does it cheerfully. We did our narrations this week from Charlotte’s Web. Here are the two sentences she came up with after hearing each passage:

• Charlotte was the first one to notice the baby chicks were arriving.
• Wilbur climbed up the manure pile.

In bible class, K has begun her third of 10 books. It is all about praying. The objectives are:

1. I can tell that praying is talking with God.
2. I can tell that meditating is listening to God.
3. I can tell when to pray.
4. I can tell where to pray.
5. I can say God’s very special prayer.

The math workbooks that I picked up from Dollar Tree have worked out beautifully. They are simple enough for the girls to do on their own, but not boring. They have each been doing a double-sided page each day.

H’s reading continues to grow, and we have added the sound for m to her repertoire. Her spelling lessons are also going really well. We still need to continue working on her confidence, as she will only read in front of me and K, and even then, sometimes she is resistant. However, when she does read during school, she very rarely makes a mistake in what she reads.

We also were able to continue on with science this week. We made models of cells using Jell-O and fruit, and the girls had a lot of fun doing it. Below are some pictures of their lab sheets and the models.

This is H’s lab sheet. She had a little bit of help with her writing, but she did the sketches of the cells she did pretty much on her own.

This is K’s lab sheet. I love how she decided to draw the strawberry nucleus as a strawberry. 🙂

The square cell model is a plant cell and the round one is an animal cell. The strawberries represent the nuclei and the grapes in the plant cell represent chloroplasts. (If I would have been thinking, I would have used a white bowl instead of a blue bowl for the animal cell, so that only the plant cell looked green. We used lemon Jell-O.)

We also had a field trip this past Thursday. We met at the church to see Nelson the Animal Guy. This was his third year bringing his amazing animals to our homeschool group, but the first year that we were able to attend. I will post more details, along with pictures from the event, in another post.