Week 26: A Beautiful Week

It has been a beautiful week here weather wise. I must confess we procrastinated a bit to enjoy the nice weather. Most of our school work is complete, but my house needs some major help this evening. Here's a look at our week.

MATH

Jessie finished up subtracting with decimals the first half of the week before completing two days of review exercises. She's enjoying sailing through her math quickly even with a few doubled-up lessons. The only new idea that I remember was adding more zeros in the decimal places before subtracting. Otherwise she did some estimating and subtracting with .99 numbers mentally. The only snag that we hit was a misunderstanding of directions on one page. The directions were to round to the nearest whole number, and Jessie rounded everything to the nearest tenth instead. Hopefully, she'll remember from now on that whole number means the ones place.
Violet has started a new unit in 2B called geometry.
She's identified shapes, counted flat versus curved sides, grouped similar shapes together, and combined shapes to form a new shape. It's actually been very similar to exercises that she completed previously in Building Thinking Skills: Primary so she's had plenty of free time this week. She had a little trouble with counting the sides of the object. At first she was only counting the visible sides. Once I explained that she had to count all of the sides, she was able to correct her work without needing to build any models.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Another week, another spelling lesson down. She finished
one u shy of a perfect spelling test. (Maybe next week.) In grammar, she's completed everything but the test for the adjective's unit. There were two writing assignments this week. The first was rewriting a story, and the second was another friendly letter. With all of our CW work, the first lesson was easy. I gave her the day off on the letter because we had just mailed the last one she wrote a few days earlier. Jessie started 2 new books for her assigned reading time. On MWF , she's reading two chapters of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Monday, I gave her a world map to mark the sighting of the mysterious creature sighted in chapter one. (Personally I was just thinking that it would be great latitude/longitude practice.) Jessie was so excited about the map that she used it the next day as she gave me her narration. She certainly had the air of a teacher using the magnet to point to the map and then
tapping it on her hand when she was just talking. Her other new story is Lad: A Dog which I have her reading once a week since each chapter is basically its own self-contained story. In Tales from Shakespeare she read the story of Hamlet. We weren't very consistent with other CW editting this week, so we basically ended up cramming everything in on either Thursday or Friday to complete the story. We finished dictating from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader using the section describing the monopods, the description of Reepicheep sailing to Aslan's country, and the final paragraph in the book.

Violet's spelling continues to go well. For grammar this
week we discussed interjection, conjunctions, and spent a day identifying part of speech in the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". I need to catch up on her grammar cards for her memory box, but Violet's doing great despite Mom being a bit behind. She finished reading Five Children and It on Wednesday and informed me that she want to check the book out again this weekend from the library so she can read it again. Her fairy tale this week was "Hansel and Gretel". For Thursday and Friday, I had her read the book Capyboppy. My thought is to use Thursdays to let her read an easier book from the 1-3 grade level of the 1000 good books list. Her copywork was very spur of the moment, (I think the sentence for Thursday was "I have finished reading Five Children and It") but at least it got done.

HISTORY

History was the other area that we let slide in favor of time outdoors this week. We did finish up our time on pioneers by reading Sarah, Plain and Tall. Our project for the week (which we tried to cram into Friday) was to weave a basket using strips of file folders and wrapping paper. We finally finished. Jessie did most of her basket independently. Violet needed some help. Benny insisted that he needed a basket but had me do all the
work for him. We also have some tin cans that we are going to turn into lanterns. I'm waiting to let DH punch the holes just so he gets a chance to help the kids with the school work for a change.

SCIENCE

We completed lesson 4 after reading reviewing the
differences between reptiles and amphibians and learning about aquatic toad, frogs, and salamanders. We started lesson 5 on primeval reptiles. Our first booklet describes how the first giant marine reptile fossil was found and what the Bible has to say about such creatures. Our second booklet covered notosaurs and mosasaurs.

ART / MUSIC

I didn't have anything planned for art this week, but I suggested the girls could draw some sea snakes even though they weren't actually into our drawing book. Not only did they draw the snakes, but they used the 1-2-3 Draw Ocean Animals book to make an entire scene. Benny drew his own sea snake picture. I love that he added the paddle shape at the end of the tail of his very well fed snake.
LATIN / ASL

Jessie completed lesson 22 in LfC A. We did review our ASL one day. The girls are starting to use their signs to ask for things when Henry is asleep.

BENNY'S PREK

Benny is very close to finishing up counting by 10s. He can also count up to 79 by ones. He's keeping up with his calendar with his sister's help. He's got most of the days of the week. He just to quit skipping Thursday. We're still working on 3 letter words. I pulled out the first Bob book one day this week. He did well with the reading, but the best part was seeing his eyes light up once he read the entire book. He read it again to DH later that evening, and I saw him with it again this afternoon. Definitely need to bring up those other books. We finished
up a couple of lion books and then just read books from our shelves.