Week 20: Moving Steadily Along

We've had a great week!! The girl's have settled nicely into the schedule. The girls are doing better at staying focused on their work so that sometimes they are even finishing early and getting a few minutes of free time until I'm available. Thursday, all three had a hard time focusing on anything. Who can blame them? It was snowing outside so we spent part of the afternoon sledding, throwing snowballs, building a snowman, and drinking hot chocolate. Here's our week:

MATH

Jessie is still working in the unit on capacity. She finished up with the metric section and worked today with gallons, quarts, pints, and cups. She actually remembered all of the conversions from last year and breezed through the exercise today. (I personally still have to stop and think about the conversions, although it is a lot easier since I've been canning and actually know what a quart and pint jar look like.)
Violet finished up the last bit of review from 1B that I wanted to cover. She started working on Singapore 2A on Thursday. The first section on numbers to 1000 is very straight forward so it's a good confidence booster for her. On the right is her first lesson in the new books.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Violet is still working on memorizing our poem Try Again. Since Jessie finished memorizing the poem by Wednesday, we pulled back out the poem Mr. Nobody from FLL last year and will spend some time reviewing. We took the week off from literature so I could get my office cleaned back up before my Mom comes to visit next week. I'm also doing a bit of reorganizing os some of the things stored in my office to make room for the baby in May. Spelling is going great. Violet has finished up her last lesson in SWO B and will move on to book C Monday. On the right is Violet's dictation. (Can you tell we were putting our history booklets together when I realized I hadn't written her copywork assignment?) Jessie has switched over to dictation completely for her handwriting and is doing great. She's had to ask a couple of times how to make one of the capital letters in cursive so I think I'll try to make her a reference this weekend that she can refer to as needed.
On the left is Jessie's summary of Cincinnatus for CW Aesop. This week we changed up our outlining a bit. For each paragraph we wrote a Roman numeral with the paragraph's topic. Then we numbered the sentences and wrote our key words as usual. This flowed nicely with R&S grammar which is talking about paragraphs. Basically, I just wanted to reinforce the idea that each paragraph has a specific topic so that when she starts typing the summaries herself in the fall, she'll have a better idea of where she needs to start a new paragraph (instead of writing everything in one huge paragraph like I did growing up).

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY / SCIENCE

The girls are progressing nicely through our US geography lapbooks completing Massachusetts and Michigan this week (on the left). New for this week, after reading our history, I sent Jessie to complete her geography while Violet gave me her history narration. Then we switched.
For history we covered Robert La Salle claiming the Louisiana territory for France, Peter Stuyvesant of New Amsterdam, and three new colonies (New Jersey, North Caorlina, and South Carolina). We completed two lapbooks (on the right): one for the French exploration of the Mississippi and one for Peter Stuyvesant. We added Stuyvesant to our timeline notebooks, and labeled the three new colonies on our map of the 13 colonies.
For science we didn't quite finish up lesson 1 of Zoology 1. I had planned to do the flight experiment on Thursday while DH was home to watch Benny. Since it snowed, we postponed the experiment in favor of playing in the snow. We'll either do it Saturday if the weather is nice or pick the warmest afternoon next week instead. Below are the two booklets that I designed for lesson 1. The larger booklet covers basic zoology, classification, and a few other random vocabulary words at the bottom with fill in the blank and matching. The idea for the winged booklet about flight came from one I saw on the internet. It covers the vocabulary related to flight with little riddles that the girls had to solve.


MUSIC / ART

No art this week. For music the kids started listening to Mr. Bach Comes to Call after I fixed the tape player. I don't think they finished so we'll take it along and finish this afternoon when we run our errands. Daily piano lessons with Mom supervising our working out very well. Jessie's hand position is much improved. It's also given us a chance to work on the frustration caused by her perfectionism. She's beginning to accept the fact that mistakes are part of learning (after the ??th time I repeated this). Violet is also slowly progressing. I believe the Bastien book is a little hard for a 6 year old, but we're just taking it very slowly.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

Benny's preschool is going great. For the alphabet game, this week we did a new variation on matching. Benny has the Fisher Price alphabet zoo. I pulled out the animals with the letters that we have learned so far. I wrote the lower case letters on Benny's drawing boards, and then he covered them with the animal with the matching capital letter. We added the letters I and i one day. Then added the letters O and o another day because Violet had taught him those letters already. He also set a new record by singing the alphabet song with me TWICE this week. For numbers, we did another dot to dot up to 7. His number recognition is great. His counting, however, needs a bit of a refresher. Thursday and Friday, we pulled out the girl's abacus for counting practice. We moved one bead for the top row, two for the second, and so on up to ten at the bottom. He can recognize groups up to 3 and then needs to take time to count (which he finds a bit annoying I believe) for groups of four or more.