Science, English, Geography

It was a beautiful, sunny day today for most of the time. H took the boys out to the park for an hour of football practice.
I've started to get the boys to do a short section of their science textbook four days a week, as progress through it had become very slow, and the topics at the moment are all revision, sometimes even of work they covered thoroughly in year 3! To do a section with the questions at the end only takes about 15 minutes. In this way we should finish it off by the summer, inshAllah.
They are also about half way through their English textbook, which seems right considering we are half way through the academic year. I know it doesn't exactly matter where we are, but although I have a structure going on I don't micro plan, so I don't lay out chapters to be covered by such and such a date etc. For this reason I like to keep an eye on marker points in the school year as a rough indicator of our speed of working!
The thing we are working most slowly on is the geography I think. I'm really not worried about that though. We'll work on it until we've had enough, regardless of whether we finish the book (Trail Guide To World Geography). I still do like that book though, and plan to use it slightly differently with the girls, inshAllah, maybe getting longer out of it.
At the back of the Trail Guide is a literature study on Round The World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. I'm not going to do the literature study, but today I finished reading aloud the book to the boys. It is an odd book, isn't it? And I'm really not sure that it should be in a geography study, as it takes such a (now) dated approach to the portrayal of the world. It is a product of its time, of course, and can be seen as indicative of attitudes of days gone by. All the stereotypes and colonialism puts it more in the history category for me!
The photo at the top of the post? One of U's activities today. Just put it there to make the post look better.