Needless to say, not alot of "school" went on this week. We did make cookies, and the girls otherwise helped me get ready for Christmas (I think I already mentioned my brainstorm of making place cards & having the girls put them on the table, so that there weren't the usual fights about who sits next to, or not next to, them). They were also good helpers after Christmas in getting the house straightened back up, and the general day-to-day chores. In cleaning up for Christmas I found A's feather duster (that had been lost) and I think she's dusted every day since we re-found it. The biggest "problem" with cleaning the kitchen floor is there's only one kid-sized mop (I need to dig, I think the other one might be behind the sofa, or in the basement, it got put away when brooms were being used in non-broom-like fashion that was far from safe) and they fight over it (I also discovered that the day after Christmas (or any big family gathering) is a lovely day to mop because the kitchen chairs were already out of the way, we hadn't moved them back in from the dining room yet LOL).
We did sit down one day to try to finish L's reading workbook (A still has a ways to go), but we'd had too long of a break and she didn't remember the names of the people (which makes reading their names & pasting their names under their pictures) kind of difficult. So we set it aside for the moment. I think, since that was the very last page, and it wasn't a lack of reading, skills that was tripping her up, we'll just call it done. I looked at the teacher's edition for A Time to Play (the next book in the series) and I'm not sure I want to get into that with them quite yet. There's also enough "Classroom discussion" that if we do it, it would be much easier to do it together, so at the very least I think we'll use other resources to "review" with Lexie until A finishes her "In the Beginning" workbook. At the moment, L seems happy with being able to sound out some words, so I might try not suggesting moving forward with it, and see if we can give her abit more time.
Yesterday the story we read in circle time was The Quiltmaker's Gift which I'll admit, I hadn't bothered to read until the end of the unit because quiltmaking was a "handwork" element of this unit that I had chosen to skip (somehow since it would have meant ME learning how to quilt, and only involved the girls in the "layout & design" element of it, it didn't strike me as an effective use of time while we got ready for Christmas, given my rudimentary (at best) sewing skills) anyway, so I left off the "quilt" books from the book list until the end. This book is AWESOME!!! In a nutshell, there's an old woman who makes amazing quilts but refuses to sell them, she'll only give them to those who need them, not sell them to "rich people". The king, who spends all his time collecting beautiful things, decides he MUST have one of her quilts. She tells him the only way she will give him one of he quilts is if he gives all his things away to the poor. At first he resists but eventually he does, and realizes how much happier it makes him to give things away than to just hoard them. This led to a long drawn out discussion about poor people and what we can do to help (of course, my attempts to suggest that they could give THEIR toys to kids who don't have any toys, was met with the logical suggestion that we just buy new toys to give to poor kids LOL, but at least it's starting to get through to them abit . . . LOL).
We also read Sun Bread this week and the girls are excited to make the sun bread, I told them we'd do that this week (at the time we read the book we had almost a full loaf of bread already made, no need to make bread when we have bread LOL. Plus I think the sun bread recipe calls for eggs which means I need to go to Sam's before we can make it).
The girls have been creating their own art projects this week, A spent a very long time yesterday making a "kite" she cut paper into a kite shape, then glued many long strips of paper to be the "string" and some other pieces of paper to be a tail . . .
ETA (edited to add, for those not familiar with all the online acronyms): You might notice I removed the memory work from the "This week in homeschool" list. The girls did really well with the memory work, while they can't quote the passage on their own, they can say most of it along with me while I read it. They weren't enjoying that aspect of circle time though, so I'm going to hold off on that for now, and perhaps introduce another passage at a later date.
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