Week 17: A Great Week!!

It's been a great week. Things didn't go exactly as I planned, but we accomplished our school work. I caught up on the laundry, and we picked out a Christmas tree on Wednesday after DH got off from work. But the best part of the week by far has been getting TWO FULL NIGHT'S of sleep. WAHOO!!! My brain's beginning to work again. Now that our week is done, we can concentrate on setting up the rest of the Christmas decorations and decorating the tree.

MATH

This has been a lightning fast week as far as math goes. Jessie finished up the Intensive Practice section on angles and began a new section in the textbook on perpendicular and parallel lines. Wednesday's math assignment took her all of 10 minutes maybe. Thursday she ended up doing 3 assignments. Basically she's been identifying which lines are perpendicular and which are not, which are parallel and which are not, sometimes as just two lines and sometimes as part of a figure. She's also been drawing both types of lines. We don't have a square so the lines she drew weren't as precise as they could have been, but I figured it was a math lesson not a drafting lesson.

Violet has started a new section on fractions this week. We talked about what 1/2 and 1/4 meant and what each number in the fraction tells us. Basically she either took a fraction and shaded the figure or looked at a figure to determine the fraction. She had so much fun "playing" with the fractions in her math lesson that she went downstairs to play with some more fractions on the dry erase board. She showed DH what she had been doing and they started adding and subtracting fractions as well. So YEAH!! it's been a good math week. I love the easy chapters.

LANGUAGE ARTS

In grammar, we moved on from direct objects to predicate nouns. Jessie did very well in the initial lessons where all of the sentences had one or the other. Once we reached a point where sentences could have either a direct object or a predicate noun or neither she struggled. I think we'll try adding a sentence or two of daily review next week. In reading, Jessie has started Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and was so engrossed in the story on Monday that she read an extra chapter. I also haven't had to remind her to do her reading this week although I'm not sure if that's due to her interest in the new book or all of our discussions on responsibility. In CW, Jessie rewrote "The Story of William Tell". She did an excellent job of outlining on her own. To be quite honest, I believe it's the best retelling she's done to date. I really couldn't find that much editing to do. Spelling and dictation are still progressing well.

Violet did some grammar catch up this week. We finished off sentence types, introduce the definition of a verb, and discussed action verbs. In handwriting, we learned the cursive R, S, T, and U. Friday I gave her another quiz to see how many of the letters she could remember. She did very well with the lowercase letters only forgetting p and q. She left a few more of the capital letters blank. I'm not sure if she didn't remember them at all or just didn't want to write down the wrong thing. In reading, Violet has also begun a new book, The Wheel on the School, in addition to her weekly reading from The Blue Fairy Book.

HISTORY

In history this week we started learning about the American Civil War. We discussed the attacks on Fort Sumter. I tried to get the girls to look at the situation from both sides. They gravitate towards making it black and white with good guys and bad guys, so it's harder to make them understand that sometimes it's just not that simple. Independently they read a biography of Jefferson Davis. On Wednesday we read (with Mom editing on the fly) about the Battle of Bull Run. We noted the mistakes that the Union troops made by going in without a plan and with untrained troops. We discussed Stonewall Jackson since I couldn't find a good elementary level biography on him. Our map work shows the secession of states from the Union after Lincoln's election and after the first shots were fired. It also shows which slave states did not leave the Union. The booklets cover Fort Sumter, Bull Run, and Jefferson Davis. In addition to these we also added Stonewall Jackson and a general Civil War figure to our time lines.

SCIENCE

In Zoology 2, we took one day to do the Lesson 1 experiment testing whether hot water or cold water was heavier. Jessie voted for cold water. Violet thought they would be about the same. Benny just wanted to start the experiment. It actually worked better than I thought. When we added the yellow cold water to the blue hot water, you could definitely tell that the bottom was turning green first. We also started lesson 2 this week on Cetaceans. We filled out one booklet with some general information on whales.

LATIN / MUSIC / ART

Yes, we actually got all three of these in this week. YEAH!! In Latin Jessie completed lesson 14 covering second conjugation verbs and first declension masculine nouns. In art this week, both of the girls drew dolphins. Violet decided to draw a whole family of them so they wouldn't be lonely. For music, we began learning about the woodwind section of the orchestra by covering the flute and the piccolo.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny is still working on counting to 50. He still skips 15 sometimes when he gets in a hurry, but he's definitely improving. In phonics we covered the letter sounds for j, g, and v this week. We read several Christmas books in addition to a few titles that I found relating to the Netherlands and turkeys. For art this week Benny used fingerpaints to make some handprint turkeys. After our science experiment with the girls, he spent quite a bit of time mixing warm and cold water and blowing bubbles through a straw. I told him that his bubble "experiment" showed that air was lighter than water, and he just beamed to be doing his own "real" science experiment.