Oh dear. Let’s just get this out of the way.
Here are our plans for the past week as taken from the last week in review blog post:
I give myself an F as in Failed. F minus.
Yes we were busy this week, but no we didn’t succeed with that list. Certainly no field trips, which are fun to aspire toward, but in reality, a penguin’s got nothing on my waddle lately. 32 weeks pregnant and slightly pathetic over here.
I am currently re-reading and trying to internalize the Absorbent Mind (a Montessori must-read).
See the bump? 🙂
I still really want to and intend to get us to the wildlife observation. But #onlyhuman.
Ok so no apple fraction muffins still. What did we accomplish?
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To begin with, Sunday was Easter.
We woke up way too early for sunrise mass, ate way too much sugar, found way too many eggs, had way too little sleep, but way too much fun.
Art:
The kids rocked pottery class this week.
They carved stamps, stamped clay with them and painted bowls they’d previously created. Cool.
Violin
The kids continue to progress in orchestra and on their Spring recital pieces.
Language:
Language work was really a focus this week.
Handwriting practice was messy.
Revisited:
A less messy alternative was also utilized…
Plus there was much metal inset work too.
Mary: 
Mike (I was super impressed with his creativity here):
We spent a big chunk of this week working on grammar. Big. Huge.
Mary switched out the flowers on our conjunction basket for the 3rd time since we began this work.
We did do drawer 1 from our Waseca Biomes Grammar cabinet finally: common vs proper nouns. The girls did this work several times. Even Josie did really well understanding for the most part.
Good reading practice too.
Mary was very proud she read the word Japanese by herself; Volkswagen was another story.
She was also really proud of mastering the grammar three part cards.
They also worked some with the Language Works program over the course of two days.
And just when you thought that was enough language work for one week, there was even more grammar practice! I switched out our grammar farm for a grammar garden. You can read more about that here (and there’s an even bigger photo dump in that post).
I shared this a couple places online and got no feedback, but I’m pretty proud of how it came about and how interested the girls have been in working with the materials. It’s really been a hit for our family!! 🙂
Books: We read a lot together this week. Mary read many readers independently — AND they listened to Magic Treehouse books 1-8 on Audible this week!
All in all, lots of language work this week — for the win.
Garden:
Look our squash is happy in midday sun! That means it’s developing a healthy root system.
Catechesis:
The girls also had a three hour first holy communion retreat today. I should sneak into the other room and take a picture of their fermenting homemade wine we had to got to take home today, but just take my word for it instead. They really loved the retreat. They made and baked bread and tasted wine and crushed grapes and made a banner. Hands on discovery is always the way to go!
Math:
Mary got in some clock work and 5 bead chains. I know she did some other math, but I didn’t take pictures most afternoons.
Josie really struggled with the concept of numbers a couple of days this week. She couldn’t add anything together, kept counting backwards instead of forwards, would count by tens on single beads — a general disaster. I don’t know where all our past addition work went. I know it’ll come back eventually, but apparently this is super common with kids with intellectual disability. Some days things magically click. Some days all the previous work is just gone fishing.
We did try a lot of one on one work with numbers and by Thursday I’d really gotten burnt out. Here’s her sister trying to help with some basic addition. Mary just looks at me like, is she crazy? This is so easy. But I’m guessing there is some hiccup in her memory retrieval whenever this occurs. I wish I knew.
We were sure to work in quiet (no music), and I simplified and then backtracked and simplified some more. Her SLP on these same days also mentioned her hands getting purple, lack of oral motor awareness and her speech was really sloppy too. I’ve had her checked out by cardio, and they said she’s doing great. I’m not really sure where else to go from here except chalk it up to a weird 22q / ID thing.
#specialneedsmomlife
I had her revisit the number rods, but as a nine-year-old she was pretty uninterested. We did have a sensorial moment of exploration with them though.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BhPKrNUjShw/?taken-by=cosmic_montessori
Mike built a maze with them.
There was plenty more Cheerio math. This video clip was pretty funny:
This was on a good day where she did multiplication just fine. Go figure, right?
Sensorial:
Jo did the decanomial with some minimal assistance. I think this is a great work for her.
The sound cylinders were used multiple times.
Practical Life:
All three polished plant leaves this week. Here’s a post on Mike working on that.
Geography:
Waseca Biomes North America Portfolios. I printed up the stamping work I wanted to do, but it’s still next to my bed at the moment. Never made it into the school room.
Language, Math, Sensorial, Geography, Practical Life… I feel like I’m missing another big area, but I’ve run out of pictures to post. I’m going to skip my usual “plan for the week ahead” part considering my epic fail this past week.
Also most of my pins from Pinterest this week were just photos of baby mobiles and plans for Mary’s upcoming birthday. So I will spare you those. In their stead, I will trade you this pic of a bloated pregnant woman in coral. She looks very uncomfortable to be trying on clothing, don’t you think?
Big. Huge. Happy, but I’m so ready for baby.
Anyway, preggo-target-shopper lady needs some beauty sleep as you can probably surmise from above photo. That concludes this week in review. Congratulate me — I stuck to something for a whole month y’all.
Love the grammar work. Reminds me of the same concept as Math U See.
As for the purple hands, look up Rynauds. (Sp.?) Common 22q thing. LittleMiss has it. So does my son, non-22q.
Thank you! Yes that does fit very well with what we’re seeing. Appreciate it Nicole <3