Week 12: Back to normal

It's been a much more normal week this time with the up and down of good and not so good days. Baby Henry has been a little cranky because of the stuffy nose with his cold. I've been a little tired from sleepy on the sofa bed with a very wiggly baby Henry. We've had several school items get lost and turn up either later the same day or the next day. Still we accomplished our work for the week, and I even had some time to work on projects around the house. They are a few less pictures this week. The batteries in my camera died on Friday as I was trying to take the last few pictures. Here's a look at our week.

MATH

Math has gone much more smoothly this week since I backed both of the girls up in their textbooks. Jessie used her fraction strips to review adding and subtracting fractions with and without common denominators, multiplying a fraction and a whole number, and multiplying two fractions. We probably could have skipped the adding and subtracting, but it was a good confidence booster for Jessie. All fractions are no longer too hard. Most days she did either all or parts of two separate exercises in the workbook. No more whining or tears, so the concepts seem to be sinking in better this time.

Violet spent the first part of the week reviewing long division. We used the cuisenaire rods, just the tens and ones, to illustrate division. We'd separate the tens into equal piles, exchange any leftover tens for tens ones, and then separate the ones. Then we took the same problem and reworked it on the dry erase board explaining how each step lined up with what we had done with the blocks. On the day we need hundreds, I just cut some squares out of cardstock to represent the hundreds, and we used a combination of 10 and 5 blocks to have enough tens. The hard work seems to have paid off. She had no problem with the workbook exercises. There was no whining or coming to ask me every 2 minutes if she was doing a problem correctly. She finished up the section in the workbook by Wednesday and spent Thursday and Friday back in the corresponding IP section.

Benny has moved on from the textbook and workbook to the IP section on addition this week. Tuesday's Singapore assignment (pictured on the left) was by far the longest exercise we've done. I pulled out most of the rods, and he determined the answer and colored it in. I was very impressed with his hard work. In Miquon, he's finished the section on addition and moved on to the first subtraction page on Friday. We used the blocks to solve the problems but pretended they stood for cookies being eaten. It's amazing how fast he answered the problems once we started talking in terms of cookies.;)

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie's spelling words were mostly Spanish based this week, ie. tortilla, siesta, etc. She scored a 100 on her test. In grammar, she finished and tested the first unit on verbs and has moved on to a second unit on verbs. We're back to diagramming sentences with direct objects. Friday we diagrammed sentences with more than one direct object. In CW this week she rewrote "The Good Samaritan" using the chart of the different parts of a scene for a reference. In literature, she has completed reading The Cat of Bubastes and is now about halfway through Age of the Fable.

Violet has reached the halfway point in SWO E. In grammar, we're still working with pronouns. Much of the week covered how to determine which pronoun to use when the pronoun was combined with a noun. (ie. Mary and she read the book to Jessie and me.) In CW, Violet rewrote the story of "Pandora". She's decided she doesn't really care for the myths and is glad that we'll go back to using a fable for the model next week. Her handwriting this week came from her new literature selection, The Dragon of Lonely Island.

Benny has finished up the paper in his handwriting book. We're going to try out the 3rd grade paper over the weekend to see if he finds it easier for writing. I guess that means next week we're ready to move on to regular copywork. In phonics, he's finished the pages covering words ending in -y and worked one day on words with the final consonant doubled (ie. tell, buzz, etc.). His new read aloud is The Boxcar Children. Now that he is actually hearing the story himself, he is much more enthusiastic about playing boxcar children with his sisters.

HISTORY

In Bible history this week, we covered most of the story of Joshua. The actual summaries and notebooking will be done Monday after we read the last few chapters. In ancient history, we finished our last week in Egypt!! YEAH!! We covered Rameses II and the decline of Egypt. Jessie also read Science in Ancient Egypt by Woods. Violet was writing messages in hieroglyphics since we finally received the book by Milton with the hieroglyphic stencil. Benny and I looked through and talked about the pictures in the coloring book Life in Ancient Egypt. The girls each put together one page on Egypt and added Rameses II to their timelines.


SCIENCE

This week in science, we covered roots in lesson 7. The girls completed two booklets on the information in the book. On Tuesday, I used our hands on time to go vote, but Thursday, we did an experiment with carrots. Violet cuts the ends off of two carrots. Jessie added blue food coloring to water, put in one of the carrots, and placed it in the window. Benny put the second carrot in the refrigerator. On Friday, we compare the two carrots on the outside and inside. The girls wrote up the lab. (No pictures. I was trying to take the science pictures when the camera batteries died.)

GEOGRAPHY

The girls each completed a page on Iraq.

OTHER

Benny did lots of drawing this week. Part of the time, he was making thanksgiving decorations for the back door. I didn't get a picture of the door, but I did take a picture of his drawing of Rabbit and Roo.
Henry's triumph for week has been discovering that he can answer yes or no by nodding or shaking his head. He's also started signing milk with his own hand and will hold his nose when I ask if his diaper is stinky. It's so much easier to communicate with him now that we're not trying to guess what he's pointing at.