Week 10: Ready for Vacation

It's been a busy week here. In addition to trying to getting most of our school work done in four days instead of five, we've been packing for vacation. Benny was running a fever most of the week, so he spent his mornings watching a movie or listening to Three Tales of My Father's Dragon on tape over and over and over... again. Here's a look at mostly what the girls did for school this week.

MATH

Jessie finished up the textbook and workbook section on fractions with more word problems involving fractions and spent the second half of the week working in the corresponding section of the IP book. She's gotten comfortable enough that she doesn't always show all of her work any more. (I'm happy for her, but it takes me longer to check it that way.) As far as the CWP, she continues to progress well through the word problems with only some occasional input from me.

Violet has spent the entire week working on long division. I'm happy to say that all her hard work is starting to pay off. At the beginning of the week, she would stop at every single step and ask me if what she wrote was correct. By Thursday, she worked most of the problems without any help from me. YEAH!! (I just hope she doesn't forget everything over our break.) Her Miquon this week dealt with area and perimeter. I'm not sure what I was doing the first day, but Jessie explained what the area and perimeter meant and showed her how to figure them out. It's great to see them helping one another out.

Benny did complete one day of Miquon where we used blocks to add.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed lesson 27 in SWO G. In R&S, she spent a couple of days with subject/verb agreement and a day looking at verb tense. The only new information this week was the outlining. She learned how to do two level outlining. There was one lesson and one worksheet, then the text moved back to verbs. Hopefully, when we get back, we can pick back up on the two level outline idea and start applying it to her history outlines. For CW, she rewrote the story "Xenophon, To the Sea". For literature, she's currently about halfway through both The Cat of Bubastes and Age of the Fable. I've decided after she finishes The Cat of Bubastes, I'm not going to assign any more historical fiction for her literature. The books are great for making history come alive, so I'll give them to her as free reads, but I want her literature to have a little more meat. I have a few weeks to decide exactly what we'll read, maybe The Hobbit or Robinson Crusoe.

Violet completed lessons 14 and 15 in SWO E this week. She finished up learning about nouns and is now working on pronouns. Since we covered this in FLL, it's been easy review this week. You can see her opinion of her grammar worksheet on the right. We made a few changes to CW this week. We completed a key word outline of "King Midas" together and then she used the outline to write her story. It did help her fill in a few more details when she wrote the story. We'll keep using it at least for a few more models. She is continuing to enjoy The Golden Goblet for literature. Her narrations are starting to improve as she gets farther into the story and the pieces begin fitting together.

Benny and I finished reading Dolphin Adventure this week. We also spent a few mornings catching up on some history and Bible reading.

HISTORY / ART

This week in Bible history, we covered the events at Mt. Sinai (the Ten Commandments, the building of the tabernacle, and the golden calf) as well as the reports of the spies sent to check out Canaan and the resulting sequence of events. For art, the girls drew a picture of the ark of the covenant. They also drew a diagram of the set up of the Israelite camp. The summary regarding Mt. Sinai went on the notebooking pages. Their summaries of the spies, we decided to save and add to our next page on Joshua.

In ancient Egypt, we briefly discussed the Second Intermediate Period and spent most of the remaining time on Hatshepsut and Thutmose III. They completed summaries on both pharaohs, and the girls drew a map showing the extent of the Egyptian empire under Thutmose III. I reminded them that they should be skeptical of the claims of the Egyptians since their purpose in recording history was to make their pharaohs sound like great gods and not to record the actual events accurately. Jessie also made of chart with information about everyday life in Ancient Egypt (ie. homes, clothing, jobs, etc.) The last history item was fixing our timelines. We added a page for 1750 BC so we could spread out the figures added up to this point and make them all fit. We also added figures for the Second Intermediate Period, the 18th dynasty, Hatshepsut, and the making of the tabernacle.

GEOGRAPHY

The girls completed pages on Lebanon this week.

SCIENCE

The weather was very uncooperative this week, and we just ran out of time. We'll pick back up with identify trees when we come back. Hopefully, they'll still be plenty of leaves on the trees.

LOGIC / LATIN

Jessie completed lesson 9 in LfC B covering 2nd person pronouns and some more vocabulary. Spreading the history reader translation work out over four days so that we only had a couple of sentences a day worked very well. Her logic went fairly well this week. One of the Mind Benders puzzles stumped both of us for a little while. After several tries and a little caffeine for me, we managed to solve it.

OTHER

Henry's been a bit more mischievous this week without his big brother to entertain him during the second half of the morning. One day he decided to help me by making some changes to Violet's CW plans. As you can see by the second picture, he put a lot of thought into his work.