Week 15: A Busy Week and a Half

It's been a busy past couple of weeks. We actually put in three days last week before Thanksgiving, but I didn't write an update because I went out Christmas shopping Friday and Saturday for presents for the kids. We only did math and LA, so it was a light week as far as school. This week we've been schooling around an appointment for Henry and a trip to get our Christmas tree before DH goes out of town Saturday. So our tree's up. I'm done shopping for the kids and my side of the family, and we squeezed in a full five days this week.

MATH

Jessie finished up the unit on the area of a triangle in the textbook and workbook. She had a bit of trouble with the diagrams themselves. She wanted to draw the rectangle around every triangle, find its area, and divide by two. It took several corrections to convince her that the base of the triangle and the base of the rectangle had to be the same size to come up with the answer, but we eventually got there. The IP section also gave her a bit of trouble. Even I had to look at a couple of the pictures a few minutes before I could see what we were supposed to do. It was definitely challenging, and we didn't even do the challenge section. At any rate as usual, it was a good way to find out what she still didn't quite understand and work on those issues together. Friday, we began a new section in the textbook and workbook on ratios.

Violet is still plugging away at the section on multiplying and dividing by 6, 7, 8, and 9. She's finished covering 6 and 7 and done a bit of review. She's getting more comfortable figuring out the answers without skip counting on a dry erase board, and it's been a great review of her long division skills as well. In her Miquon Purple book, she's been working on manipulating numbers and some subtraction. Basically there is one number on the page with pictures showing different ways to make the number (ie. 423 could be 4 hundreds, 2 tens, and 3 ones; 3 hundreds, 12 tens, and 3 ones; etc.) Then a couple of the pages had her pick which way of writing the number was needed in a subtraction sentence, so it was a good review of borrowing from a slightly different angle.

Benny finished up the IP section on addition last week and has started subtraction in his 1A books. Some days, he had to look at a picture and write the entire subtraction sentence, and other days he just solved for the answer. In his Miquon Orange book, he is continuing to work through the section containing a combination of addition and subtraction sentences that need to be solved. He's figured out how to add 1s and 2s in his head, so he doesn't necessarily need the blocks for every problem. As you can see by the picture, he likes to write the answers as large as possible (in addition to shouting the answers loudly even though he is sitting right next to me.)

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed two more spelling lessons over the last two weeks. In grammar, she's working with linking verbs with predicate nouns and predicate adjectives. She learned a few verbs like taste that can sometimes by used as a linking verb, did some diagramming, and took an outline from several lessons back to turn into a report on Thursday. In CW Homer, we started analyzing "The Parable of the Prodigal Son". We did more sentence diagramming, practiced paraphrasing by synonym substitution (I really need to go buy that thesaurus), and have both agreed that we dislike the KJV of the Bible stories. I'm definitely going to switch to a different version for Violet. For literature, she's started reading The Children's Homer by Colum three days a week while continuing through Bulfinch's Age of the Fable. The latter has gotten much more difficult over the past week as each chapter is packed with several smaller characters instead of one or two main ones.

Violet's completed 2 and a half more spelling lessons. In grammar, she's finally started working on verbs as well. She's been identifying action verbs and spent a couple of days changing the tense of the verbs from present to past. In CW Aesop, she's been analyzing the fable "The Lion and the Mouse". We took some time to look up a few words in the dictionary, actually examine the entire entry, and discuss the different parts of the entry. We converted some indirect quotations to direct ones and did a slightly longer sentence for dictation that we have been up to this point. She did a great job of placing the comma in the sentence where I paused. In handwriting, I decided that in the spirit of Christmas she could copy Christmas hymns this month. This week, she started copying What Child Is This? For literature, she begun reading The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Colum. So far it's proved challenging but not too hard. She still gives accurate narrations of the material, but the amount of detail has decreased.

Benny spent last week working on the /ch/ sound in Phonics Pathways. This week he's been working on two pages that review all the digraphs he's learned so far. We've taken it very slowly because he gets very frustrated when he mixes the sounds up, but it's starting to come a little easier. He actually hasn't done that much in the way of handwriting as he's been spending a lot of time with DH, so we'll have to try to get back on track with that next week. The picture on the right wasn't actually school work just Benny playing with the pattern blocks for fun after using them for Building Thinking Skills: Primary a few minutes earlier.

HISTORY / ART

For our Old Testament studies this week, the kids read about Ruth and Naomi and the early life of Samuel. The girls completed a small map showing the location of Bethlehem and Moab to put on their notebooking page with their Ruth summary. The summaries of Samuel will be finished up next week. We did go ahead and add both Ruth and Samuel to the timelines as close to the correct time periods as we could get them.
For ancient history, we started our studies of Greece. On Monday the girls did a map of the physical geography of Greece. (I found some great maps online here.) I assigned Jessie a short reading on how geography shaped Greek life that I found online. She ended up having to take notes in order to write a summary, but it eventually got done. Jessie also read the first five chapters of The Story of the Greeks by Guerber, filled in a chart of the early Egyptian and Phoenician explorers who settled in Greece and taught the native inhabitants a variety of skills, wrote a summary of Deucalion, and drew a family tree showing the relationship between 4 of the Greek tribes (which will go on a notebook page next week). She also wrote a few paragraphs on the Greeks' religious beliefs using her reading from The Usbourne Encyclopedia of the Ancient World. Basically I asked her: What do the Greeks believe about the gods? How did religion affect their daily life? and What did they believe about death?
For Violet, I decided to hold off on Famous Men of Greece until we get to the more historical figures because I just don't really care for their retellings of the more mythical figures. She's been reading Usbourne's Greek Myths for Young Children and wrote narrations this week on Heracles and Perseus. She also read the first 9 pages of The Golden Age of Greece to get an overview of what Greek life was like. Both girls drew a Pegasus from 1-2-3 Draw Mythical Creatures by Levin.
Benny and I have also been reading Greek myths using the same book as Violet. The second day after finishing our Bible reading he told me that he wanted to read "the book with the strange stories" and pointed at the myth book. He and I read about Prometheus, Pandora, Persephone, and Arachne this week. Friday, we used Classical Kids to make our own Pandora's box. (I'm not sure why he decided to try and duck my picture, but he thought it was hilarious.)
GEOGRAPHY

The girls completed pages on Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Iran over the past two weeks. (We did geography Thanksgiving week instead of history and science.) I put a blank wipe off map up in the dining room for review. Jessie did a great job and even knew several countries I have never specifically taught her yet. I haven't had a chance to try the map with Violet yet. It had been rolled up so long (I bought it used.) that the putty isn't holding it to the wall for more than a few hours. I'll have to try to fix that this weekend.

SCIENCE

We finished up the lesson on trees and finally made it outside to estimating the tree height of a few of our trees. According to Jessie's calculations our small oak tree is 16 feet tall. Violet estimated the red bud tree at 20 feet, rubbings of various trees in the yard while Henry played on the slide and I played frisbee with Jack. The girls started lesson 10 on gymnosperms. Benny decided he could wait no longer and pulled up two of his carrots Thursday at lunch time and declared them to be delicious.
LATIN/LOGIC

Jessie and I completed lesson 13 in LfC B which was another review chapter. She also completed her regular logic assignments.

OTHER (HENRY'S CORNER)

As usual, Henry's been wandering around trying to figure things out. He took the batteries out of the television remote one day and put one of them in backwards so the remote didn't work for the rest of the day until DH came home and looked at it. (I didn't know he had actually pulled the batteries out, so I just thought they needed replaced and hadn't bothered to do it yet.) He's also been sneaking downstairs on his own to play. When DH went to investigate one day, he found this.
He's actually pretty good at operating the truck.