Week 16: On Our Own

It was a strange week. DH left Saturday to go to the beach with a friend of his and came back on Thursday. There was no pressure to have school done at a certain time or to straighten up before Daddy got home. The kids spent as much time out in the snow as they could before it melted. I caught up on some housecleaning, and we finished all the Christmas decorations except the gingerbread house which is still sitting out in the back of my van. Still we managed to accomplish our work. Here's a look at this week.

MATH

Jessie's assignments on ratios were easy this week, so most days she finished math early and worked ahead in other subjects. She simplified some ratios and had some word problems involving ratios. Friday, she started the corresponding section in the IP.

Violet has spent the week multiplying and dividing by 8. After the pages covering just the basic facts, her math assignments took forever this week. She did some multiplying of larger numbers by 8 and some long division with 8 plus a couple of review pages. In Miquon, she is still manipulating numbers to subtract.

Benny's continued subtraction in his 1B text and a combination of addition and subtraction in his Miquon text. The Singapore had him solving subtraction problems and the filling in a number bond with the numbers from the subtraction sentence. He also had some picture where he had to write the entire subtraction sentence. His Miquon was similar, but he used a set of blocks to write addition and subtraction sentences.


LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed lesson 34 in SWO G and the second unit on verbs in R&S 5. In grammar, she's now moved on to a new unit on pronouns. The basic concepts are review but some of the terminology (ie. antecedents) is new. In CW Homer, she completed her rewrite of "The Parable of the Prodigal Son". I haven't told her yet, but I'm sure she'll be glad to get the rest of December off from her CW lessons. Her literature continues to be The Children's Homer by Colum and Bulfinch's Age of the Fable.

Violet also continues to do well with her assignments in SWO E. I thought this week might be a little tricky because the list had a combination of words ending in -er and -or, but she sailed through her test. In grammar, she's spent most of the week working with state of being verbs, although today's lesson began to introduce helping verbs. In CW Aesop, she rewrote the fable, "The Lion and the Mouse". She's continuing to enjoy her current literature selections.

Benny finished up the section covering the digraphs /sh/, /ch/, and /th/ in Phonics Pathways and has moved on to -ng endings. We've did a better job of getting to his copywork this week. Most days he had a short 3-4 word sentence to copy for me. For literature, he requested the next book in the Boxcar children series, so we began that on Monday.

HISTORY / ART

In our Old Testament readings this week, we finished up reading about Samuel as judge, started Saul as the first king, and introduced David. Both girls completed summaries of Samuel. Violet started a summary of Saul, and Jessie asked for a chart for Saul which I'll work on over the weekend. They both completed a map of Saul's kingdom with Jessie's containing a few of the specific locations mentioned in the reading. Saul was added to the timeline.

In ancient Greece this week, Jessie studied about the Minoans and wrote a two paragraph essay explaining what we know about the Minoans based on mythology and archaeology. Violet read a few pages about the Minoans from The Greeks by Burrel and gave me a list of 5 things that she found interesting (which somehow did not make it onto her notebook page). She also read about and completed summaries on Theseus and Jason from Usborne's Greek Myths for Young Children. Both drew their own minotaur using 1-2-3 Draw Mythical Creatures. For maps, Jessie's map shows the locations of the Minoans palaces on Greece while Violet's simply locates Crete relative to Greece. After assembling their notebook page, they added the Minoan civilization to their timelines. Benny and I are still working our way through the book of myths.

GEOGRAPHY

I forgot to write the geography assignments on the checksheets this week. Friday, they completed a page for Afghanistan.

SCIENCE

The girls finished up reading about gymnosperms this week and completed the corresponding homemade booklets. We have two lessons to cover next week before we officially finish with botany for the semester.

OTHER

Since science didn't have any hands-on activities, the kids made Christmas angels one day this week. I have a picture of Benny's to post, but I'm not sure where the girls have taken theirs.

Henry missed having time with DH this week and spent a lot more time playing with his big brother.