Week 33: Steady progress

It's been a quiet week here. Baby Henry's nose is finally starting to clear up so he's back in his own bed at night. School has been a bit of a roller coaster. Some days the kids were blazing through their assignments as fast as they could, and other days I thought they would never finish. In the end, we finished up our work and are ready to enjoy the weekend.

MATH
Jessie spent the week completing a new unit on symmetry. She completed the textbook and workbook section the first half of the week and the IP section during the second half. Basically, she identified which figures were symmetrical, drew lines of symmetry, or completed a symmetrical figure as seen in the picture on the left when given half of the figure and a line of symmetry. Her CWP assignments were a little more challenging this week than they have been in awhile, but with a little prompting she did a great job of drawing the diagrams and completing the assignments.

Violet spent the week working through the first section of the 3A IP book. Some days, she breezed through the lessons and other days... well let's just say we had plenty of opportunity to discuss a few character issues. Most of the problems were a variation on the idea that from a number like 4253 you could make 4 thousands, or 42 hundreds, or 425 tens or 4253 ones. She seemed to have the most difficult with the concept that 4 thousands was the same as 40 hundreds. We may need to go back over this section at the start of the next school year.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Jessie completed lesson 11 in spelling with flying colors. In grammar, she's been learning about prepositions and prepositional phrases. To help her identify the prepositions, I made a card for her memory box with the preposition list from Violet's FLL book. So far she's identified phrases, seen them used as either an adjective or an adverb in a sentence, and begun diagramming them. We did finish up her CW assignment on "The Gingerbread Man". I think we have one story that we skipped earlier in the year to go back and complete over the next couple of weeks. She has finished reading both 20000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lad, a Dog this week. At her request, she's begun reading The Swiss Family Robinson today.

Violet struggled with her lesson 34 test in spelling on Tuesday so I'm having her repeat the lesson and test again next week. In grammar, she has also been working on prepositions all week in FLL. (It's so nice to have them on the same topic.) Her copywork continues to be from Little Pilgrim's Progress. She's doing very well at forming the cursive letters individually. Every once in a while she makes a mistake in connecting letters and bitter becomes litter or lick become luck with a dotted u. We haven't been doing anymore dictation simply because her handwriting is neater when she has a model from which to copy. For reading, she started A Cricket in Times Square this week and read two more selections from the Blue Fairy Book.
HISTORY
History this week has been all about inventors and inventions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Together we learned about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Individually, the girls read biographies of Alexander Graham Bell and Luther Burbank. We completed booklets on all four men and added all but Burbank to our timelines. Our map for the week shows the United States as of 1990.

SCIENCE

In science this week, we completed lesson 7 by learning about agnathans. The girls found the lampreys and hagfish interesting. Benny was excited because he had seen hagfish recently on the Discovery Channel while watching "Dirty Jobs" with DH. We also began lesson 8 on Thursday completing a booklet with basic crustacean information (the girls liked coloring the different parts of the lobster the best) and another on lobsters and crayfish.

LATIN

Jessie completed lesson 28. I need to put in some time over the weekend and catch up on vocabulary.

ART

Jessie drew a hammerhead and a crab this week. Violet and Benny each drew a crab of their own.




BENNY'S PREK

Benny has completed the section on three letter words this week. The next lesson starts short vowel words with double consonant endings. We're going to take a break from the phonics book and read Bob books and make words on the refrigerator with letter magnets for a couple of weeks until he is more fluent at three letter words before moving on. Right now if you give the word hot for example, he says "/h/. /ho/. /t/. HOT!" He figures out the words successfully, but it takes quite a bit of effort on his part. We have started working on the months of the year with a little song. He mastered everything except for the month of May. I keep telling him that he can't forget May because that's when Henry and I have birthdays. So far it hasn't helped him remember. Friday, he completed a crab craft while the girls were working on their history booklets.