Week 5: A Juggling Act

It's been one of those crazy weeks where nothing goes as planned. DH has been home for 3 days, which always means I relax our schedule as much as I can so the kids can have time outside with him. The other two days we had morning appointments in town so we moved a few subjects around and took some school work on the road. In spite of the juggling act we still managed to get through most of our scheduled work. Here's a look at our week.


MATH

Jessie started a new section this week called Multiplication and Division of Whole Numbers. It started out with some review of multiplying and dividing by a one digit number. Then we spent the second half of the week learning how to multiply by a two digit number. Having always just followed the pattern of how to multiply numbers in school, it was nice to actually see why it works. Jessie was a little intimidated by the larger numbers the first day, but she did very well on her exercise this morning. On the left is one of her number crosswords from Thursday.

Violet has been finishing up the textbook portion of the mental addition and subtraction section of 2B. She didn't always choose to do the problems mentally, but she has still done an good job this week. The one issue we need to work on is being more careful in doing our work correctly. A couple of the lessons were very short, and she was able to finish them quickly. Once she realized she could have more free time, she began rushing a bit which of course always leads to an increase in careless mistakes.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie has finished up another dictation selection from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I think we'll probably pick one more selection from this book and then move on. Spelling seems to be going well. Jessie did very well on her unit 1 grammar test on Wednesday. Right now, she learning to identify sentence fragments and run-on sentences in R&S 4. Our selection for CW Aesop this week was "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing". I'm glad to see that Jessie is more relaxed in narrating the story back to me in her own words. Our biggest struggle last year when I let her do the key word outlines was that I couldn't get her to understand that it is actually OK to make changes in how you tell the story.

Violet's been copying the 23rd Psalm this week. For grammar we talked about seasons of the year, which months are a part of which season, how to abbreviate the months, and how many days each month has in it. On the right is the chart we made during our discussions. For spelling, I believe that I'm going to switch from oral tests to written ones. Violet seems to have more trouble spelling the words out loud. It's like she loses her place and ends up either adding extra syllables or leaving one out. When I asked her to write the word instead, her spelling was fine.

The one part of school that keeps falling through the cracks is our afternoon literature time. It's always harder with DH home urging the kids to go outside. Hopefully next week we can buckle down and get back on course with our read aloud.
MEMORY WORK / FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Jessie has finished memorizing 1 Corinthians 13!!! YEAH!! I'm very proud of her. It's by far the hardest passage I've ever assigned. She's really looking forward to starting something new next week. Violet is about half way through the 23rd Psalm and making steady progress. Both girls have now finished memorizing the poem Don't Give Up. (Now I just have to get them to keep applying the lesson it teaches.) Violet's already moved on to our next poem, True Nobility. Jessie will be ready to start on Friday.

Jessie is still enjoying her Latin lessons although the end of this week finds her a bit more confused. She doesn't really understand why there are so many noun endings. Since the point seems to be simply recognizing that there are endings and what they are, we'll go ahead and move on to lesson 4 next week. I promised Jessie we could take a break at lesson 5 and review to make sure she was comfortable with all of the vocabulary and grammar before we moved on. Spanish and sign language also fell through the cracks this week with our hectic schedule. We'll work them back in next week.

HISTORY / SCIENCE

This week in history, we reached the presidency of James Madison and the War of 1812. I decided not to cover the war in too much detail this time around. We highlighted the burning of Washington, the battle of Fort McHenry where Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner, and read a couple of short historical fiction stories about other battles. For their independent reading the girls both read biographies this week on Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse. For our time lines we added James Madison, the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key, Robert Fulton, and Samuel Morse. The first two topics were combined in one booklet on James Madison while the remaining three each have there own booklet.

In science this week, we have finished chapter 11 by studying and completing booklets on wasps and termites. That means I have some work to do this weekend since I haven't read or made booklets for the remaining Zoology 1 chapters yet.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny's time has been a bit disorganized this week. We were supposed to read books on Japan and dragons. We've only read one of our Japan books. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we have read three of the dragon books over and over again. We've also been reading from the pile of books that Benny found by himself last weekend at the library. We did go ahead and make are dragon face this week which Benny is very proud of. I think we'll just keep the books and finish up next week when things have settled down a bit. DH has a lot of overtime hours scheduled for the rest of this month, so I felt it was more important for Benny to spend time with his Dad this week. He's been reviewing number recognition to 10 with DH using a deck of cards, and we're continuing to work on the vowel sounds for a, e, and i. He's still a little unsure of e, but his accuracy is improving, and he's still having fun.