MATH
Jessie wrapped up the textbook and workbook section on fractions at the beginning of the week, and spent a few days completing the review exercises in both books. Next week she'll be moving on to the fractions section of the intensive practice. Her fractions work went very well. The only part of the review exercises that gave her any trouble was the double digit multiplication. She kept forgetting the unit place 0 when multiplying by the tens digit. I think we'll add one or two wipe board problems a day for a couple of weeks just for some additional practice. We might also take a day to review the why behind the multiplication since that always seems to help cement the process in her head.
Violet completed the intensive practice section on multiplying by 4s, 5s, and 10s this week and spent two days with general review before starting a new section on money. I was thrilled to see that she remembers the value of each of the different coins from last year. New for this week, we finally started up the challenging word problems level 2 book again. This week she did 3 problems a day of the regular problems and 2 problems a day in the challenging section. She did a much better job of reading the questions carefully than when we first attempted the book at the beginning of the year. She ran a bit long a couple of the days so I may need to adjust the pace. We'll see how next week goes. I haven't written out a new schedule for the CWP book and will probably just keep winging it for a while.LANGUAGE ARTS
In grammar this week, Jessie has been breezing through her lessons. R&S takes 3 lessons and 1 worksheet to cover singular and plural nouns covering the basic rules, a few special rules, and some irregular ones as well. Friday's topic was on giving titles to paragraphs. Spelling went well. We're still making steady progress through the battle section of The Horse and His Boy for dictation. In CW Aesop, our fable for the week was Mercury and the Woodman. We struggled a bit this week in getting to the lessons. I wanted to start her on the level three descriptive writing section. To be honest, my brain just wasn't up to the task. We did manage to add a few adjectives and adverbs here and there. I picked out a couple of words that were repeated several times like brought and dove and had her look them up in the dictionary for synonyms. Hopefully, next week I'll have time to really look at the core guide and pick up a thesaurus so we can be more focused in our efforts.
Violet did very well in her language arts this week. Her spelling lesson for the second half of the week covered homonyms. I had expected the different spellings to confuse her, but she seemed to know for the most part which spelling went with which meaning without any extra instruction on my part. In grammar, we covered statements. Our other new addition for the week was starting cursive handwriting. We covered the uppercase and lowercase letters from a through d. She did any excellent job. The lowercase b and the uppercase D gave her a bit of a challenge and the slanting of letters will probably come eventually. All in all she is off to a great start.
MEMORY WORK / LATIN
Both girls have completed yet another poem. This week they finished the last verse of Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. Jessie has almost completed memorizing Exodus 20: 1-17. She's worked on finishing up the last commandment this morning. Violet informed me that she needed a new Bible memory card since we still have the 23rd Psalm in the daily slot of her memory box. Hopefully, I'll get back up to speed here over the weekend.
This week Jessie struggled a bit with Lesson 9 of LfC A. We missed doing one day of lessons and tried to catch up on Wednesday. The result is she hadn't memorized all of the vocabulary before her test this morning. She also needs some more practice with her translating. The grammar for the lesson discussed the two functions of the nominative case, subject nouns and predicate nominatives, so the translations were all three word sentences of subject, linking verb, and predicate nominative. I also realized that we need to implement a system of review for older vocabulary and grammar concepts. For the vocabulary, we'll work on new vocabulary daily and start reviewing old vocabulary on a weekly basis. For the grammar concepts, I've decided to add the noun endings, verb endings, etc into her memory box on white cards to ensure that they stay fresh in her mind.
HISTORY / SCIENCE
As usual, when something has to give it is usually in this section of our homeschooling. We did complete our booklets, timeline figures, and map work left over from before vacation. The booklets covered the Oregon Trail and Narcissa Whitman. In addition to these we added timeline figures for 3 more presidents, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, and . For map work we added the Oregon Trail to a previous map containing the Santa Fe trail. The week's history reading was supposed to
cover Sam Houston, the Battle of the Alamo, and The Mexican War. We did read and narrate a biography of Houston, and the girls read and narrated a shorter selection on Susanna Dickinson, one of the women in the Alamo. We didn't get to our second day of reading so we'll stretch it out over next week. Normally, this would bother me, but truthfully I have spent so much effort on getting ready for our new science book next week that I didn't have the map work ready anyway.Our science goal for the week was to assemble and decorate our lapbooks on insects. We do have the lapbooks assembled. I have a ladybug and a dragonfly paper craft for the girls to work on this afternoon to decorate the outside. I'll post some final pictures of their lapbooks over the weekend.
MUSIC / ART
No music this week. I need to check the book out from the library again. For art, I'm counting their lapbook decorations as our art for the week. It will be a few more weeks before we start anything more formally.
BENNY'S PREK
There's not much new to add here. We spent the week in PP reviewing the s, m, and n pages again. He has the sounds mastered but doesn't always blend them with the vowels correctly. In counting, I'm still trying to get him to remember 15, 16, and 17. This week we read stories from France. I didn't add another animals because we hadn't finished up our previous topic of sheep. Below is a current look at Benny's sheep puppet. We're going to add some cotton balls for wool, but I'll have to pick up a bag tomorrow when I run errands.
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