Week 18: On our own...

It has been a loooong week. DH went to the beach to fish with some friends so we have been on our own. Baby Henry didn't sleep very well and ended up in bed with me almost every night. (He makes a great bed warmer albeit a wiggly one.) School was a bit disorganized and took much longer than it should a few days, but we finally managed to get the bulk of our work done.

MATH

This week in math Jessie finished up her Intensive Practice book section on parallel and perpendicular lines. Basically, it was just another combination of drawing and identifying the line pairs. Wednesday she began a new unit on perimeter and area. We started with regular rectangle, moved on to two or more rectangle put together, and finished up finding what I call the picture frame area when you stack on rectangle on top of the other. She did an excellent job this week.

Violet finished up her workbook section on fractions and moved on to her Intensive Practice. Again more pictures to determine the fraction, fractions to illustrate, pairs of fractions to compare, and pairs to match up to make a whole. Her favorite part of math was lining up the orange rods for Miquon to make a meter stick.

LANGUAGE ARTS

On Thursday, Jessie finally finished up the chapter in The Horse and His Boy that we have been using for dictation. So Friday, we pulled out Prince Caspian. Jessie's first selection is a long paragraph describing Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy entering the treasure chamber at Cair Paravel after being brought back to Narnia. In grammar this week, we looked at pairs of words such as raise and rise, set and sit, etc. She also had a lesson on taking notes. Rather than follow the grammar assignment, I let her pick any animal she wanted for the lesson. She chose seahorses and took notes from three different sources. Sometime next week, we'll go back and do the actual writing. CW didn't get done yet this week past the outline. The plan is to complete the assignment tomorrow and move on next week. For reading she's on her second week with Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and read "The Comedy of Errors" in Shakespeare. Her one complaint with Shakespeare was that he didn't give the twins different names so it made the story more confusing.

Violet has made it through the letter X in her cursive handwriting, so we'll finally be ready to switch back to copywork next week. In grammar, we covered state of being verbs. She continues to read The Wheel on the School and selections from The Blue Fairy Book. One area both girls need some work on is simply being more careful in completing spelling assignments. There's been a recent rash of misspelled words in the lessons themselves when the list of words is right there to look at, so we've established a consequence of writing any misspelled word 20 times since simply asking them to be more careful hasn't accomplished anything.

HISTORY

In history, this is our second of three weeks on the Civil War. The highlight of the week was our lesson on the Monitor and the Virginia (or Merrimack as the Union called it). We also spent a day reading about the battle of Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address. For independent reading, the girls were assigned biographies on David Glasgow Farragut and Clara Barton. We completed booklets for all four and added the corresponding four time line figures.

SCIENCE

Science this week was all about toothed whales. We read about dolphins, porpoises, orcas, belugas, narwhals, and sperm whales. Each section in our tabbed booklet has 2 to 4 questions about each topic. There is also a tab for learning about the melon and echolocation. We completed another lab this week as well. The test was to determine whether fresh water or salt water would freeze more quickly. Truthfully, the hardest part of the lab is making sure everyone has their own part to do in the experiment. Jessie filled the cups with water. Violet added the salt, and Benny stirred. Jessie was the only one who correctly guessed that the salt water would take longer to freeze.

LATIN / ART / MUSIC

Another week, another Latin lesson. We learned 10 new nouns in lesson 15, otherwise it was basically another review of grammar. For art, the girls each drew pictures of orca whales. Music will probably get done tomorrow in the van when we run errands.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny's preK is still going very well. I think we have one more letter to learn in Phonics Pathways before moving on to three letter words. In the interim Benny has decided to move himself on. He and Jessie have been drawing maps for a bike race in the basement this week. He brought me a map with the letters MAP written at the bottom and asked me what other letters go in the word map. I told him he had it all figured out and gave him a high five for his work. We've been reading stories from Denmark (basically picture books of Anderson's fairy tales) and books about whales. The Anderson fairy tales are long so we'll need another week to get through them. For a craft Benny chose to fold an origami whale together since he already has a stuffed paper bag one made a couple of years ago.