Week 35: Bring on the nice weather

I am so ready to be able to open up our windows and let in some fresh air, to hang my laundry on the clothes line, and to send my kids outside for some exercise. It's been an up and down week. Jessie had a stomach virus at the beginning of the week, and Violet had a lighter version of it midweek. Jessie actually slept so long Monday afternoon that when she woke up she thought it was Tuesday morning. Somewhere between cleaning up bathrooms, visiting with my Mom, and a couple of doctor appointments, we did manage to accomplish most of our work this week.

MATH
Jessie completed the Intensive Practice section on solid figures over the first half of the week and began working on the final section in the textbook and workbook covering volume Thursday. (YEAH!! We're almost done!!) She practiced determining the volume by counting up the number of 1 cm cubes used to make the figure and then learned the V= length x width x height formula. Her CWP is also almost complete for the year. She's working one section behind on the solid figures unit, but will be in the final unit on volume next week.

Violet has continued adding and started subtracting with numbers up to 1000. We kept the lessons from Mom short and mostly let her do the workbook pages after she informed me that she already knew how to do this. Her Miquon pages have had her working with fractions. For problems like what is 3/12 of 12, she caught on very quickly. When she had to start comparing 1/3 to 1/4, we broke out the fraction strips that I made last year for Jessie and then she did very well.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Monday when Jessie wasn't feeling very well, you would have thought the spelling words were in greek based on the amount of time it took her to do the work. (I think it had more to do with lack of sleep than anything else.) By the end of the week, she did much better. In grammar, we completed unit 10 on prepositions. We didn't get to CW. She's continuing to enjoy The Swiss Family Robinson and The Book of Three. We only did a couple of days of dictation, but are close to finishing our section in The Silver Chair.

In spelling, Violet began working through the review units, which have gone very smoothly so far. In grammar, we are still working our way through prepositions. She's doing very well memorizing the preposition list. She completed a few days of copywork. For reading, she finished The Cricket in Times Square and The Fairy Doll in addition to her weekly fairy tale from The Blue Fairy Book.

HISTORY
Together this week, we learned about the Wright Brothers and Seward's Folly. Independently, the girls read biographies of Louis Pasteur and Dr. Wilhelm Roentgen. I feel like we are jumping back and forth alot on our timeline, so I will probably change the order up considerably when Benny does American history in a few years. We completed booklets and added timeline figures for all four topics.

SCIENCE

This week we completed lesson 9 in Zoology 2. It really would have been easier to spread the lesson out over two weeks, but I'm ready to be finished and move on to a new topic. Tuesday, we learned about crustraceans and bivalves. Thursday, we covered gastropods. The kids were excited to learn that most of our conch shells from the beach are actually whelk shells.

LATIN/OTHER

Lesson 30 complete. We've basically dropped ASL for now, although the kids still use it to ask for something when Henry's sleeping.

ART / MUSIC

The girls each drew a squid, which we'll learn about in science next week. We didn't get to music, so I really need to try to make some progress and finish up over the next few weeks.

BENNY'S PREK

For phonics all week Benny has been reading Bob books. He's mastered the months of the year. For counting we're using a hundreds chart to count by ones and the abacus to begin learning to count by 5s. My mom read him several books during the week since he didn't get much time to play with his sisters. Today he's hobbling around because his legs are sore from getting his last set of immunizations on Thursday so I gave him the day off.