Week 11: Getting Going Again

It has been a very long week here. I don't think we've ever had this much trouble getting back into our routine after our fall beach trip. We did have a couple of attitude issues to deal with at the beginning of the week. After the attitudes improved, things settled down a bit. Here's a look at our week.

MATH

This week was supposed to be all review for Jessie as far as math. She began the fractions section of the IP before we left on vacation. Well, math took way to looong this week. I knew I was in trouble when she asked, "How do you multiply fractions again?" Then it was "When you divide a fraction by a whole number do you put the one above or below the whole number?" AARGH!!! By Thursday, I just told her to put down the math book and get on with her other work. After thinking and praying about it for a bit, I realized that while she had gone through all the right motions doing her math work in the textbook and workbook she had missed the concepts. So on Friday we backed up, opened the textbook to the start of the fractions section for a second time, pulled out our homemade fraction manipulatives and started over. Jessie was a little worried about getting behind, but the truth is there's always been one section every year that needed extra time. I'm sure there will be another section later where we can pick up the pace and catch back up.

Violet's week in math went very much like Jessie's. She struggled a bit with multiplying the larger numbers and had completely forgotten how to do long division. By Thursday, again we just stopped the assignment and took a breather. Friday, we backed up not quite to the beginning of the section on multiplication and division. We started with problems such as 27 x 4 and reexplained the concept. She caught back on quickly, so we moved on to three digit problems like 146 x 5. Then I had her do a workbook exercise. She did very well, so we'll skip the practice exercises in the textbook and move on to long division on Monday.

Benny is still adding in both of his math programs. For Miquon, he uses the blocks. For Singapore, he used pictures twice this week. Friday, the introduced the idea of solving the addition problems using a number line to count on the appropriate number of hops. He did very well.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Language arts went better than math luckily. Jessie finished another spelling lesson. In grammar, she spent two more days working on two step outlines. Then we spent the rest of the week talking about verb tenses in English. For CW, we began analyzing "The Good Samaritan". The synonyms and paraphrasing by synonyms on days 2 and 4 went OK. I really need to go buy a decent thesaurus before we analyze the next piece because we weren't very good at coming up with synonyms. The picture on the right is her paraphrase of a few of the sentences in the story. This week she just read The Cat of Bubastes. We need to check Bulfinch's Age of the Fable out from the library again. It's been sitting there on hold waiting for us all week. I forgot to pick it up Monday since it was on Jessie's card, and we just never made it back into town the rest of the week.

Violet managed to pass her spelling test after completing only half of the exercises in the workbook. (Don't ask me how with a check sheet in front of me, I still managed to miss that she didn't complete her spelling work on Wednesday. Obviously, I should have had regular coffee instead of decaf that morning.) In grammar, she still working on pronouns. For CW Aesop, we analyzed "Pandora" looking up vocabulary in the dictionary, discussing capitalization, and writing a couple of sentences for dictation. She had all of her library books. She finished The Golden Goblet, read a chapter each from The Red Fairy Book and The Complete Peterkin Papers, and finished the week with a historical fiction book titled Casting the Gods Adrift, which is set during the rule of Akhenaton.

Benny and I worked on words that end in -y this week for phonics. We introduced the -y on Monday, spent three days reading the page with y added to double consonant words, and finished by starting the page that adds y to three letter short vowel words after doubling the final consonant. We also finished learning the alphabet. We going back to review all the letters. Somewhere in there he managed to escape a couple of days with not handwriting. Now we're ready to start transitioning to copywork without any tracing or any dots to show where the letter starts. We didn't have a new chapter book this week, so we just read fables, Pooh stories, and Potter stories instead.

HISTORY and ART

History was very disorganized this week. I never did get the daily history plans written on their check sheets other than the Bible readings. Basically, they came and asked what to read. I went and found the books, flipped through them quickly, and told them what to write. For Bible history, they covered the time period of Israel's forty years of wandering and ending with the death of Moses. The map shows the location of some of the different groups of people who were living in the region. Jessie also mapped Kadesh where they camped while the spies went to Canaan, and Mt. Nebo where Moses died. For Egypt, we covered Akhenaton and his attempt to have Egypt worship one god, Aton. Jessie's writing focused on the reasons Amernhotep III encouraged the worship of Aton, the actions of Akhenaton, and the final reasons the worship of Aton was abandoned. We also learned about Tutankhamun and mummies. In addition to their spines, Jessie read In Search of Tutankamun, and Violet read Mummies Made in Egypt. They drew pictures of a sarcophagus and added the two pharaohs to their timelines. Benny also learned about mummies, and we wrapped up one of his bears for fun.

SCIENCE

We went back out to trees this week. Monday, we wrote down whether the crown of the tree was rounded or pointed, whether the leaves were simple or compound, the arrangement of the leaves, and a few phrases to describe the bark. Wednesday, upon discovering that the dried leaves that we were planning to use for our tree books were damaged by the dog chasing his ball into the dining room, we took the field guide outside and tried to identify the trees. I must confess, we didn't do very well. The guide I had from the library wasn't the easiest to use. Because several of out trees were small, we had a really hard time trying to id them. In the end, we decided to try again in the spring when we can also look for flowers, nuts, and berries. That gives me plenty of time to find a more child friendly field guide.

GEOGRAPHY

The girls covered Israel and Jordan with minimal help from me. YEAH!! I need to put up our markable map, so we can start reviewing next week as we go.

LATIN and LOGIC

Logic went fine. Latin was a review lesson. Jessie and I decided that it would be best to spread it out over two weeks to give us more time for review the vocabulary and all the pronoun chants. Next week we'll work on the history reader and the memorization before she takes the test.