Week 22: Treading water...

It's been a long week here. Baby Henry hasn't had a fever, but all of the stuffy noses and congestion have made sleeping anytime a struggle. He has at least learned to appreciate my suctioning out his nose instead of screaming while fighting me with all his might. We got our core work done along with some but not all of the extras that I had planned.

MATH

Jessie continued in her unit on decimals in the new 4B books. She learned about the hundredths place, did some converting between fractions and decimals, and did some addition and subtraction of either a few tenths or a few hundredths to solidify those places. She did an excellent job all week. Most of the lessons have been fairly easy for her so we did some doubling up on assignments. She did struggle a bit with the conversion between decimals and fractions. I was surprised to see that she struggled with the fraction part of the problem. It may just have been that she didn't write out the fraction when she was simplifying or multiplying. I'll wait to see how she does next week with the thousandths place before I add in any more practice.

Violet is still breezing through the unit on capacity. Truthfully I could have combined several of these lessons and been done with the unit already, but I'm trying to slow down the pace because I don't want to go too far into the 3A book this year. For once her Miquon lessons have actually corresponded with her Singapore ones. While the Singapore lessons were in liters, the Miquon lessons introduced gallons, quarts, pints, and cups using rods to represent the amounts. One day she had a square represent one gallon and had to figure out how many quarts, pints, and cups made a gallon. Another day she had different rods in the middle of the page to match with amounts around the outside (ie. an 8 rod = 1/2 gallon, 2 quarts, and 4 pints). I think she surprised even herself with how well she did.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie grammar has definitely improved this week. The difference between subject and object pronouns and how they are used in a sentence seems to be sinking in at last. In spelling, she has finished the exercises in the SWO F book. She'll start SWO G on Monday, and I'm sure will finish the last test from F on abbreviations with flying colors on Tuesday. In dictation, she did a happy dance Thursday after we finished up the scene where Lucy meets Aslan again in Prince Caspian. Friday we did a short paragraph describing the actions of Reepicheep and the other mice during the battle with the Telmarines. In CW, we finally finished editing Jessie's version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." For independent reading, she began Caddie Woodlawn by Brink and had the week off from Shakespeare and history biographies.

Violet has finished up the lessons on verbs this week. Friday we took the story "The Quarrel" from one of the lessons and picked out a few sentences to identify nouns, pronouns, and verbs. With a little coaching she did fairly well. In spelling she is officially half way through SWO D. Most of her copywork for the week came from The Wheel on the School. She finished up the last chapter of the book on Wednesday, read a story called "Goldilocks" (This one was a princess not the three bears girl as I had assumed when I made the assignment.) in the Blue Fairy Book, and read another third of The Reluctant Dragon, which she seems to be enjoying immensely.

HISTORY / SCIENCE

Part of our history lessons fell by the wayside this week. I had hoped to finish reconstruction and start on pioneers this week. We are almost finished with Be Ever Hopeful, Hannalee to cover reconstruction. I hope to finish reading the last few chapters either this afternoon or tomorrow. No booklets, maps, etc. this week. I do have a couple of fun projects lined up for next week.

For science this week we learned about sea lions, fur seals, and walruses. Benny spent both days looking at the seal pictures while I read until he could correctly distinguish a true seal from a sea lion and a fur seal. Jessie and Violet were both surprised to hear that walruses change colors. Even I didn't know that a normally brown walrus became pink when it is warm and white when it is cold. ART / MUSIC

No art this week. For music we learned about the bassoon and contra bassoon.

LATIN / OTHER

Latin this week was a review lesson giving Jessie time to catch up on the vocabulary. Because we have finally reached lesson 18, Jessie has now finally started using the history reader that came with LfC A. She was very excited and did a great job with her translations. For sign language, we watched the second Signing Time DVD and practiced the signs.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny only had two days of school this week. I overslept one morning and was still eating breakfast when it was his school time. On DH's day off, he was having such a blast downstairs with his play dough that I didn't call him up. Today, I've been trying to complete the last of the carpet shampooing so we can return the shampooer to my MIL this weekend. Despite the lack of consistency, he's been doing his magnetic calendar every day. He did very well on his two phonics lessons reading the three letter words. I didn't prepare any craft for his this week. He did take some computer paper and make some very fancy crowns on his own.