Week 36: Hanging in there

It's good that we only have two more full weeks of school before we lighten up and break for the summer. Benny as always is more than happy to complete his school work but spends the remainder of the day begging to go outside. I've been sending him outside with the one or both of the girls every day I can, but he's still been really rambunctious inside. Jessie and Violet seem to be having more and more trouble focusing, and their work quality is starting to lag as they do things just to be finished. At any rate, we're trying to persevere and finish the school year.

MATH

Jessie has been working through the IP section on volume. For the most part she has done an excellent job. She seems to have the concept, but doesn't always follow through for the problems. She'll multiply the length and width and move on without factoring in the height. I must say that I understand how she feels. The amount of double digit multiplication can be a bit mind numbing. Actually, Friday I cheated and used the calculator on the computer to check her work.

Violet did very well a couple of days and then it's been like she's completely forgotten how to borrow. One day I actually marked every problem wrong and told her to start over on a different page. It took forever, but she finally completed them correctly. I'm definitely leaning more towards repeating the first two chapters of 3A next year. In contrast her Miquon pages have been perfect. She still working with fractions. Using either our fraction strips or the number lines on the page, she's figuring equivalent fractions, adding and subtracting fractions, and even multiplying factions and whole numbers. She struggled a bit with a few bar diagrams this week, but they were the challenging problems so that at least I expected ahead of time.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed SWO G lesson 14 this week. In grammar, we've begun working on the last unit covering punctuation and dictionary use. I'm trying to remember to lighten up on the assignments since Jessie has covered a lot of the material already. For CW, we finally finished editing "Rapunzel" and I printed it out on a two page spread for Jessie to make into a book tomorrow. For reading, I've increased the number of chapters that she is reading each day in The Swiss Family Robinson and The Book of Three. Even with the increase, I think the books are going to run past out school calendar. I can't decide whether to keep going as assigned reading or simply tell her that she can finish the books herself. In dictation, we've finally started a passage from The Last Battle. Jessie wanted to rewrite the scene where Trinian appears as a ghost to the Narnian children in our world.

Violet's continuing the review exercises in SWO D. I've also started retesting her on some of the previous book's lists. I haven't been very consistent about keeping up with misspelled words, so I want to make one last effort to master the lists through D before she moves on next year. She manage to escape without handwriting most of the week. Apparently I didn't prepare any copywork ahead of time, and she didn't remind me. In grammar, we've finally finished with prepositions! YEAH!! She's begun reading A Little Princess three days a week and is close to finishing The Blue Fairy Book.

HISTORY

We're still kind of bouncing around in the same time period learning about different people. We started off the week reading about polar expeditions and Robert Peary. Then we spent the remainder of our time reading about the accomplishments of women. Together, we learned about Maria Mitchell. Independently, the girls read biographies of Elizabeth Blackwell and Ellen Richards. The summaries have been very short and to the point, but we did complete booklets for all three women and added Peary, Mitchell, and Blackwell to our timelines.

SCIENCE

We completed lesson 10 this week on cephalopods and chitons. Tuesday, we introduced cephalopods and learned about squid and cuttlefish. Thursday, we studied octopuses, nautilus, and chitons.

ART / MUSIC

Art lessons this week consisted of each girl drawing drawing an octopus and a starfish. I'll post the pictures in a separate art gallery post tomorrow. In music we finished the brass section covering tubas and trombones before introducing the percussion section.

BENNY'S PREK

We tried a little bit of the next section of Phonics Pathways this week. Although Benny could read the four letter words, it was really slow going. We've switched back to the Bob books. Once we've gone through the A series a second time, I'm not sure what we'll do next. I have the Pyramid book written by the same author that I might be able to use. (I never used it with either of the girls, so I really have no idea what's in it.) We can always just place letter scramble with the magnets and see how many words we can make and read each day. His counting is about the same. I think we may need to take a different approach over the summer. We can do some of the Kumon dot-to-dot books. I'm also considering the Singapore Earlybird series, but haven't made a final decision yet. We've been reading stories from The Lion Storyteller Book. He decided for his craft that he wanted to make a kangaroo. (Don't ask me why.) So here it is.