Week 13: Moving Forward

Overall it's been a good week here. Henry's stuffy nose is better than it was over the weekend. We're down to sleeping on the couch for only the second half of the night now. Jessie's finally getting used to the new work load. Violet's still wasting an amazing amount of time each day, while Benny zips through at the speed of light. If I average them all together, then I could say that we finished right on time every day. ;) Here's our week...

MATH

Jessie and I have finished reviewing the remainder of the fraction concepts in the textbook and workbook. I believe we covered dividing a fraction by a whole number and then a couple of days of word problems. On Thursday, she started back in with the IP section. After a brief moment of panic where she tried to claim that she had forgotten how to change improper fractions to mixed numbers to which I calmly replied she was more than welcome to use the fraction strips if she needed them, she did very well with her IP work without bothering to pull the strips out. So far, so good. She's actually been finishing early most of the week. I'm hoping to add the CWP book back in next week.

Violet has finished up the IP section on multiplying and dividing by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10. On Friday, she had a review exercise in the textbook. Next week, she'll be ready to move on to a new unit in the textbook and workbook. She did start back into her CWP book this week. Her work is excellent, but it takes her forever. Part of the issue is that we haven't started working on memorizing any multiplication facts as yet, but a good bit of it is simply a lack of focus.

Benny continued working on addition in his 1A IP book and subtraction in his Miquon book. His math skills are excellent. We actually spent more time concentrating on writing the numbers more legibly than we did solving the problems. He tends to reverse a few of the numbers on occasion with seven being the trickiest. The one downside to the Singapore books is that he could really use a bit more space to write since he makes his numbers so large. We've currently compromised that he should try to write his numbers as small as he can, but they don't have to fit in the box on the page.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie has finished up another review lesson in SWO G. In grammar, we're still mostly working on verbs and their principal parts. We did spend two days on a lesson covering taking notes and then completing a writing assignment using those notes. It was a good reinforcement of what we've been trying to do with her history assignments. For CW, we analyzed "The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard". Basically, it was more scene analysis, synonym work, diagramming, and paraphrasing. (I really need to go buy a thesaurus, but DH has my van again while his truck awaits a replacement for yet another electronic component. Does anyone besides me wish you could buy a vehicle without all the electronics?) Anyway, for literature she started reading Rip Van Winkle. It was the perfect size to fill in for a couple of weeks before she starts The Children's Homer in conjunction with our history unit on Greece. Her Age of the Fable reading are more familiar stories focused on people. This week she read about Atalanta and Hercules.

Violet correctly spelled all her words in lesson 19 on Thursday. In R&S 3, we're still working on pronouns. She finds the lessons to be very simple. For handwriting, we finally completed a full five days worth. I'm hoping to write out next week's over the weekend, instead of during the school morning. In CW, we analyzed the fable, The Fox and the Crow by looking at vocabulary, discussing quotations, and writing a direct quotation for dictation. She's continuing to enjoy all of her literature selections.

Benny has started his first consonant digraphs in Phonics Pathways. We spent 3 days working on the /sh/ sound and 2 days on the /th/ sound. He does the typical mistake of making a /f/ sound instead of a /th/ one. The hardest part is balancing correcting his pronunciation without making him completely frustrated with the book. For copywork, he wrote his full name and the names of other family members this week. We did try using the third grade handwriting paper, but he is my first to prefer the larger lined K paper so we switched back. (At least I finally have a use for that stack of paper. It's been on my shelf for over 5 years now.) The picture on the write is one of his pages from Building Thinking Skills Primary since I don't post the children's names online. He's continuing to enjoy his literature selections and our afternoon reading time.

HISTORY

This week for Old Testament history, we finished up learning about Joshua and started reading about the judges up to Gideon. Violet finished up narration of Joshua from last week. For Jessie, I changed up her Joshua assignment. I asked her to write 3 paragraphs. The first paragraph was to cover how Joshua learned to be a leader, which required some discussion since I was asking her to remember information from the book of Exodus. For the next two paragraphs, I asked her to evaluate the actions and decisions of Joshua with the first paragraph recounting his successes and the second his errors. The map shows the land conquered by the Israelites under Joshua and the land that still needed to be conquered. We added timeline figures for Joshua, the conquest of Canaan, the period of the judges, and Gideon. In Near East history, we studied the Phoenicians and the Assyrians. Jessie read The Phoenicians by Odjik and The Assyrians by Landau. For the first, I had Jessie take notes on general information (when and where they lived, etc.), their trading (attitude, products, and ships), and influence (alphabet and colonies) which was turned into a summary. For the Assyrians, I simply asked her to summarize a block of pages covering some of the basic everyday life type information. (Neither of us were captivated by the Assyrian civilization to want to go any deeper.) Violet had to list 5 interesting things she learned about each from The Kingfisher Book of the Ancient World. Both girls completed maps of the Phoenician colonies and the Assyrian kingdom and empire. Each civilization had a timeline figure as well. Benny and I read from The Usborne Book of World History, although I confess to editing both selections in several places.

SCIENCE

We covered lesson 8 this week about stems. The girls completed booklets. We put a piece of celery in water with red food coloring and watched the results. We also made a playdough stem to demonstrate how stretching one side cause the stem to bend.

GEOGRAPHY

The girls covered Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

LATIN / LOGIC

Jessie's logic continues to go well. In LfC B, we covered lesson 11 with NO NEW VOCABULARY!! The vocabulary was a review of the accusative prepositions. I've decided to drop Prima Latina with Violet. It really just felt like busywork. My new plan is to work on her personal responsibility for staying on task and completing her work through the end of the year. Then in January, we'll start LfC A at a slower pace of one lesson every two weeks since she won't know the majority of the vocabulary.

OTHER

As always, Henry was underfoot and up to mischief the entire week. He's also been practicing his growling noises basically nonstop.