Week 24: A Few Bumps

We hit a few bumps in the road this week so not everything has gotten done that I had planned to accomplish. Actually, for once it doesn't even bother me a little bit. Maybe I've finally found that balance between structure and flexibility that I have been wanting, or it could just be that I haven't been sleeping very well and am too tired to care for now. Here's what did get done.

MATH

Jessie hit a mental roadblock working with fractions in math this week. Somewhere between comparing fractions and equivalent fractions, she simply didn't get the concepts. She was at upset at first when I told her that we needed to go back through the textbook and workbook exercises before trying the intensive practice section. After I explained that we were going to make some manipulatives to help her better understand the concepts and showed her in next year's math books why she needed to understand fractions better this year, she accepted the fact that we needed to review (even though she's still not thrilled about it). In Miquon she's been enjoying plotting points on a grid so math wasn't a total bust this week.

Violet has been breezing through her addition with regrouping exercises. She definitely has the concept down. I've only had to correct a few careless errors here and there. This week it was her Miquon exercises that I actually needed to sit down with her to help. They were covering multiplication in terms of doubling. (If 2x2 is 4 and 4x2 is 8, the 8x2 must be...) Since she hasn't done a whole lot of multiplication, I expected her to have some difficulty with these and made her get out the rods to use. After laying out the rods end to end for a few problems, she realized that she could just pick up the rods in her hand and add them up mentally. For 4x6, she picked up 4 number 6 rods in her hand, looked at her hand for a minute, and then told me the answer was 24 because if 2 6 rods made twelve, 4 rods made 2 groups of 12 which was 24. I was thrilled. It's great to see her making some connections with her math. She's also progressing well with her addition math drill. She has master the +5 key, is close to mastering the +6 key, and has starting working on +7.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie and Violet both finished memorizing our poem Loving Jesus this week. They got another week off from literature because although I have 3 different titles on hold none of the copies have been returned yet. Well, hopefully next week we'll have at least one of them. On the right is part of Violet's copywork for the week. If you look closely, you can probably guess which half of the page was written on Valentine's Day when she was rushing to be able to open her Valentine's presents.

At the beginning of the week, Jessie informed me that she wanted to work on the section of The Magician's Nephew where Aslan is creating Narnia for dictation this week, so we started it. She is insisting that we do all of that part of the story, so we'll probably be working on it for a while yet. In Classical Writing, Jessie really stepped up and worked hard this week. We started our outline together on Tuesday. On Wednesday since I didn't have a math assignment to leave for her while I went to a doctor's appointment, I asked her if she thought she could finish the outline on her own. She did a great job. It took her a little more than one page of regular notebook paper, which is a lot of writing for her, but I could tell that she was proud of her accomplishment (even though she admitted her hand was a bit tired).

GEOGRAPHY / HISTORY / SCIENCE

We only did geography one day this week, and finished up Nebraska. I'd like to make a couple of file folder games over the weekend to reinforce what we're learning. I'll post some more when I have them completed. We managed to do all of our history in 2 days this week. On Monday, we covered the smaller wars that lead up to the French and Indian war. On Friday, we read about the founding of Georgia. We added Oglethorpe to our timelines, labeled Georgia on our colony map, and took some time to color the map.

For science, we finished up lesson 3 about feathers. On Tuesday we learned about the 5 different types of feathers and preening. We added 6 folded sheets of paper with fill in the blank information to our feather diagram from last week: one for each feather type and one for preening. On Thursday, we talked about why feathers are so colorful. The girls took colored pencils and scribbled in the flap booklet which colors went with which type of pigment.

ART / MUSIC

No official art this week. Jessie made small Valentine's cards for everyone, and Violet made snowflakes for Jessie and Benny. For music they listened to Mr. Back Comes to Call one day while they were playing the basement without me even realizing it, so hopefully we can find another composer when we go to the library this afternoon.

BENNY'S PRESCHOOL

Letters: Benny is now more than halfway through the alphabet!! The picture below was taken when we did letter matching on Monday. By the end of the week, Benny had also learned the M and m. He thought it was funny when I told him that pretty soon we would need to use a second drawing board because there was only room for one more animal on this one.
Numbers: Mostly finger counting this week. Friday, I wrote numbers on the board and asked him to hold up that many fingers. It got everything 5 and under but needed a bit of help with 6 to 8.

Other: This week Benny took a break from cutting and wanting to work in his pasting book. We glued a beak on a duck, a mouth and nose on a dog, and a face on a panda bear in addition to the two pages pictured below.