Week 15: Improving Our Responsibility

It's been a good week. We've gotten the bulk of our school work done. Both girls have improved this week in being more responsible for their own work and have done a much better job of staying focused as it went along. I feel like we're in a good position to lighten up next week instead of trying to play catch up before the holiday. Here a look at our week.

MATH

We finished fractions! WooHoo!! Jessie has started a new unit in math Wednesday and is working on angles. Wednesday, she practiced reading the protractor that was drawn on the page. Thursday, she measured her own angles between zero and 180 degrees. Friday she learned how to figure out angles larger than 180. Her CWP is still going well. She still working through a section of challenging problems this week. She needed my help a couple of days with the problem set up. Today, even I couldn't set up the diagrams correctly without working the problem algebraically first.

Violet is still plugging away at the money topic. After a couple of review pages in the text, she has begun the money section in the Intensive Practice book, and has done very well. In Miquon, she been working with square numbers. The first two days, she was only working with numbers up to 5 squared. Wednesday, she had to figured out 6 through 10 squared. She pulled out the cuisenaire rods and worked through the page all by herself without asking for my help. I love to see her confident enough to try to work a problem out on her own.

LANGUAGE ARTS

The one area that isn't quite finished yet this week is Jessie's language arts. In CW, we were supposed to be rewriting "Bruce and the Spider". We did get it outlined on Monday, but that was the only day we got to it. Spelling is going well. In grammar, she has almost finished the unit on verbs. She did finish reading Little Lord Fauntleroy, and her Shakespeare story for the week was "Much Ado About Nothing". Dictation is still going well. I think we'll finish up the battle scene in The Horse and His Boy sometime next month. (I wonder what she'll pick next?)

Violet is continuing to do well with spelling. She's done a better job this week of looking up words that she doesn't know in the dictionary at the back of the spelling book. In grammar, we discussed exclamatory sentences on Tuesday and practiced identifying types of sentences on Thursday. In reading, she has finished up Follow My Leader today and will be ready for a new selection after Thanksgiving. Her cursive handwriting is coming along very well. We're up to the letter O now. On the right are her sentences we used to review today. Not the best sentences in the world, but I did manage to use all of the upper and lowercase letters that we had learned so far. The only letter that gave her any problem was the uppercase K. I'll have to make an effort to work it in more next week for some additional practice.

HISTORY

History this week was all about Abraham Lincoln. We read about his boyhood up through the point where he became president. Independently, the girls read a biography of Allan Pinkerton, the first American detective. We made booklets for both men and added Lincoln and a figure for the new states added in the 1860s to our time lines. For map work this week, we did an updated map of what America looked like in 1860.

We finally finished the first chapter of Zoology 2 this week. Our topics were the ocean floor and the abyss. After we finally found a balloon and a two liter bottle, I demonstrated how an increase in pressure can cause the balloon to shrink in size. There is one other experiment at the end of the chapter that we might try next week for fun, but I don't think we'll do a write up on it.
OTHER

No music or art. Maybe next week. In Latin, we've completed lesson 13. Our memory work is still plugging along.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny has done very well this week. We're still working on counting to 40. Sometimes he goes too fast and skips a few numbers. When he gets to 39, he usually stops and looks at me. All I have to do is repeat 39 to prompt him to remember the last number. In phonics, he learned the sounds for the letters b, d, p, and t this week. He still mixes up the letters b and d sometimes, but once I tell him which letter it is he chooses the correct sound. His blending is improving. He doesn't always want to take time to sound things out and tends to make more mistakes when he's in a hurry. I think we'll probably just scramble some letters with the magnets next week before introducing more new sounds. Our reading topics for this week and into next week have been Spain and dinosaurs. I only found a couple of tales from Spain, but we've had plenty of dinosaur books to choose from. Below is the T Rex we made together this morning.