Week 34: A bit distracted

It's been a rather disjointed week. I've been trying to get ready for my Mom's visit and plan a few fun activities for Benny's birthday so I haven't done a very good job at keeping to our schedule. We did finish all of our school by doing more work in the afternoons than normal. Here's a look at our week.

MATH
In math this week, Jessie began and completed a section on solid figures. She started off the week learning about a cube figure. The rest of the figures for the week were all built using various amounts of cubes in assorted configurations. She either had to figure out how many cubes were in a given figure or determine how many cubes needed to be added or removed to change from one figure to another. The section itself was short and simple so Jessie completed not only the text and workbook, but also the IP section as well. She also had one day of review at the beginning of the week.

Violet plugged along through the section section of the 3A book covering addition and subtraction with larger numbers. This week has been mainly a review using only numbers up to 1000. A couple of days were spent focused more on word problems and using bar diagrams to solve them. Her proudest moment of the week was solving the word problem on the right because she drew the bar diagram all by herself.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Lesson 12 in spelling was a review this week. In grammar, we've continued working on prepositions and prepositional phrases. We also spent one day on conjunctions and another reviewing all of the parts of speech covered up to this point. In reading, she's continuing to enjoy The Swiss Family Robinson. She even spent Monday afternoon making her own version of a tree house on her bookcase. On Tuesday, she began reading The Book of Three. On the left is a sample of her dictation for the wekk. We're still working on selections from The Silver Chair. Finally, for CW I let her choose her selection this week. Her choices were Rapunzel or Rumpelstiltskin by Zelinsky or "The Story of Robin Hood" which we skipped earlier in the year. She chose Rapunzel. In order to encourage her to put in her best effort, I promise that we would make the final copy into a book that she could then illustrate.

Violet has finished up the lessons in SWO D. We'll spend the next couple of weeks going back through the review lessons that we skipped previously to make certain the material is mastered. For grammar this week, it has been all about prepositions and memorizing the preposition list from FLL. She's still thoroughly enjoying The Cricket in Times Square. Her fairy tale for the week was "Cinderellis and the Glass Hill", and on Thursday she read The Rocking Horse Secret by Godden.

HISTORY

Together we learned this week about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal. Independently, the girls read biographies of Marie Curie and George Eastman. Jessie ended up writing most of her own narrations this week. Even Violet took the initiative on Thursday to write her Eastman summary by herself rather than wait for me to stop what I was doing to write it for her. We completed booklets on all four topics and added corresponding timeline figures as well. We also added two more presidents to our timeline: Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

SCIENCE

We finished up lesson 8 on Crustaceans. There were four booklets covering lobsters and crayfish; crabs including fiddler crabs, hermit crabs, and Christmas Island crabs; shrimp and krill; and finally barnacles, horseshoe crabs, and trilobytes.

ART

This week's art assignment was to draw a shrimp. Jessie finally got around to sketching one out in pencil for me. Violet chose to create a whole scene with several shrimp and crabs.

LATIN

Lesson 29 completed.

BENNY'S PREK

We've spent this week reading Bob books together for phonics. He has two books remaining in the first series. It's been a nice change of pace from Phonics Pathways. I think we'll read at least part of the A2 series before returning back to the phonics book to attempt four letter words with double consonant endings. He's still counting. I think we might try skip counting by 5s next week. He did remember the month of May in his months of the year song. Yeah! His favorite book of the week has been A Kindle of Kittens by Godden. I've lost count of how many times I've read it. Below is a picture of the paper plate lobster that he made on Friday.