Week 27: Chugging along

It's been a good week, a busy week. I'm close to finishing our taxes. YEAH!! I have a more general idea of where I want to go with history next year. I'm catching up on the housework. YEAH!! Hopefully, this weekend I can start focusing more on finishing up plans for this year. Here's our week...

MATH

Jessie is still working through the section on basic operations with decimals. This week's main focus was multiplying with decimals. There were also a couple of lessons of word problems. I did slow the pace back down this week to what I had originally planned. While Jessie is doing very well with her multiplication, it takes her longer to solve each problem than with addition or subtraction. Even with the slower pace we had a couple of long mornings.

Violet completed the geometry section of the textbook and workbooks and began working through the corresponding section of the Intensive Practice book . Her favorite part of math this week has been her Miquon assignments. All the lessons dealt with maps overlaid with grids. She identified where things were located, drew sections of the map blown up to a larger scale, and even drew a couple of maps of her own.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed lesson 5 in SWO G with her first perfect spelling test in the new book. YEAH!! In grammar, she tested to complete the unit on adjectives and began a new section on adverbs. Last year she struggled a bit with the adverb section, but this year so far so good. For reading, she is continuing to enjoy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lad, A Dog. Her Shakespeare story this week was "Othello". (She's already asking me if she's going to do a real Shakespeare play next year and if so, which one? I haven't gotten that far in my planning.) For CW, we began rewriting "Little Red Riding Hood". Our dictation selection is from The Silver Chair. Currently, we're working on the section where Jill meets Aslan at the beginning of the story.

Violet's spelling continues to progress well. In grammar this week, we discussed and identified direct quotations. Violet's newest reading selection is All-of-a-Kind Family, which she seems to be thoroughly enjoying. Her fairy tale for the week was "Snow White and Rose Red". I missed choosing a book for Thursday so she got the day off. Her cursive copywork is steadily improving as she gets more comfortable writing the words. On Thursday, she did her first cursive dictation sentence since I was in the middle of cleaning the fish tank and had forgotten to write something down ahead of time. She did an excellent job.

HISTORY

We finally moved on to a new history topic. YEAH!! This week's history was all about the Wild West. We learned about cowboys, cattle drives, and Buffalo Bill. The girls read biographies of Annie Oakley and Bill Pickett. For map work, we colored in a map of the United States in 1880. We're finally back to creating booklets for a new lapbook. This week's booklets covered Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and Bill Pickett.

SCIENCE

We skipped science on Tuesday since we were running behind that morning, and I hadn't finished preparing the booklets. Our lesson Thursday was about pliosaurs and plesiosaurs. We took a tape measure downstairs and measured out the largest pliosaur on the basements floor. After measuring the total length, we did just the hear with the kids beside the tape measure to how many would fit in its mouth.

LATIN / ASL

Lesson 23 in LfC A was another review week. It gave me a chance to catch up with my vocabulary. Jessie got some more practice translating and completed another huge crossword puzzle in the activity book. Her favorite Latin assignment for the week was drawing pictures of various Latin phrases like hairy house and long letter. I though she did a great job so I actually took a Latin picture for a change.

We did watch a new Signing Time video. This one was about moving. We learned signs like walk, jump, and spin. I don't really care for the format of the second series, but the kids still seem to be enjoying themselves.

ART / MUSIC

There was no formal art lesson this week. (No large marine reptiles in the 1-2-3 Draw Ocean Animals book or even Jessie's 1-2-3 Draw Mythical Creatures one.) Violet opted to draw a clown fish. Jessie chose to draw Little Red Riding Hood to go along with her CW story. DH was home sick Thursday so we didn't get a chance to do music. We were supposed to try to be quiet, but I'm not sure how successful we were. There's always the van tomorrow when we run errands if I can remember to take along the book.

BENNY'S PreK

Pretty much the same as last week. Still counting to 80 by ones and to 100 by 10s. Still working on remembering Thursday in the days of the week. Still reading 3 letter words. We did pull out the second Bob book for a change of pace this morning. Our theme for the week has been elephants. Benny made a paper bag elephant puppet this morning while the girls completed their history activities.