Week 1 Wrap Up

Phew! We made it. Our first official week of fourth grade is in the books. I won't lie, there were tears, whining and frustration, but it all worked out in the end.  Here's what we did this week.

I am expecting Henry to read one book every week. By Thursday, he hadn't started anything and wailed, "I'll never be able to read a whole book by Sunday!" I suggested that perhaps he would make a better choice next week and start reading on Monday.  The book he wound up reading is Minnie and Moo: The Case of the Missing Jelly Donut. Not great literature by any stretch, but he read it and he thought it was pretty funny.  Baby steps, right?

Social studies was fun, though.  We are studying Sumeria, and I found some fun hands-on activities on Pinterest.  Thank God for Pinterest!  Henry made a ziggurat out of Legos,

 he wrote his name in cuneiform on a clay tablet (with clay that he dug out of the creek bed himself),

and he made some Mesopotamian bread.

  I'm not worrying about names of kings and dates they ruled.  I want him to remember four key things about the Sumerians: They are credited with inventing the wheel, they wrote in cuneiform, they had a legal code, and Gilgamesh.  He also thinks the statues with the freaky huge eyes are pretty cool. 

We did not really do any science this week.  I have discovered that the science book I bought is going to be more of a supplement than a curriculum.  So, I went ahead and bought the membership for Mystery Science.  It is laid out nicely, and Henry liked it when we had the free trial.  That will give us a much better plan than my pick-and-choose efforts.

Math is math.  We are still reviewing multiplication tables, basic division, and the dreaded rounding and estimating.  For some reason, all of my children have hated rounding and estimating.

We will have Monday off for the Labor Day holiday, but we'll be back at it on Tuesday.  See you next week!