Weeks 12, 13, and 14 - Oops

Goodness, time just got away from me.  I was so excited for Thanksgiving that I let everything else go. We did have a lovely holiday. My brother and his girlfriend came over, and we had a wonderful time.  Then, hunting season began. My family hunts. It provides us with about 1/5 of our meat supply for the year. Big Sister got a buck, as did Papa Bear. Big Brother #2 got a doe. We have lots of yummy venison.

As for school, things are cooking along pretty well.  We are sort of treading water with spelling.  When the new year hits, I will be using actual spelling lists.  Until then, we are still working on prefixes, root words, suffixes and meanings.  I will say that knowing what different prefixes mean, he can figure out what new words are without much explanation from me.  I hope it will help him with his reading as we go along.

Math is coming along. I have been using Edhelper.com, fourth grade math, second three months of school.   It's a mixed review every week.  Over the past couple of weeks, we have been doing long division (very long, like 8,433,167/41). There were only six of those.  They were actually a lot of fun to do.  Henry was, of course, overwhelmed when he saw the numbers. He said, "How am I supposed to figure that out?" I said, "By taking it one little bit at a time." Voila. No issues whatsoever. We have also been introduced to decimals, improper fractions, and factoring. Today, as a treat, I let him do the math book I had intended on using all year. He whipped through four pages like they were nothing.  That tells me that he's absorbed the "harder" stuff.

We are  still in Ancient China, but we'll be finished with it early next week.  I am not making him know all of the names of the dynasties and the dates.  We have the big stuff down, like the Great Wall, inventions and medicine.  We are going to do a few crafty things to finish it up on Monday, then we will go on to Ancient India.

Science has been the super fun highlight. I heard about a podcast called Wow in the World! They take one topic every week and dive in with a kid-friendly explanation. It comes out on Monday, and it's become our Monday must-do. We  have found out that there is a rat that lives in the Solomon Islands that can crack a coconut open with it's teeth. We know why onions make us cry. This week, we found out about coral bleaching. Every week, we listen and Google things as they come up. It's science, geography, and fun storytelling all in one. I highly recommend it.

Henry is still reading Hatchet. With any luck, he will finish it by Christmas.

In Mama's Corner, I have been knitting mittens and hats in anticipation of snow. It's become insanely cold, but we've had just a few flurries. I am hoping we have a white Christmas. If not, we'll still have nice warm hands and heads.