Week 17: Winding Down

It's been a great week. The girls have done their work well and quickly for the most part. I gave them their checksheets for this week and next on Monday, so they can see what needs to be done before we start break on Christmas Eve. They had the week off from CW, since I didn't want to start a model before Christmas and finish it afterwards. They also got some extra free time since we had no hands on lab activities. The extra free time was much needed on Tuesday so I could clean out the pantry after a bag of rice went bad, and I found little white worms crawling in my pantry. It was gross, but my pantry looks great now and I found a new way to entertain Henry (which I'll explain at the end). Here's our week

MATH
Jessie spent this week continuing with the IP section on ratios. I think I had to remind her once to make sure she put the numbers in her ratios in the correct order, otherwise she did an excellent job. There were lots of bar diagrams drawn for the word problems with no prompting from me, the normal two to three problems that we needed to work through together, and lots of very quick, efficient work so that most days she accomplished a lot more in the first hour than called for by the schedule.

Violet spent the week multiplying and dividing by nine. She seems to have found it easier than multiplying and dividing by 8 last week. One day she actually made herself a little chart showing all the products when multiplying the numbers 1 to 12 by 9 to speed up the long division. It seemed to work for her very well. I think I may make her a multiplication reference table to use for her work after Christmas until she gets her math facts mastered.

Benny wrote lots and lots of number sentences this week for both math programs. In Miquon, he had blocks and equations with one missing number to be filled in. Thursday we also had one section of a page to write our own number sentences using the block pattern given. His Singapore assignments were basically the same except with pictures instead of blocks. He struggled a little on Monday, so on Tuesday we reviewed the idea of number bonds, parts vs whole, and how that fit into writing the number sentences for addition and subtraction. He did very well the rest of the week.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed lesson 35 in her SWO G book and is set to finish that level next week. In grammar, she's still in the section on pronouns. This week discussed possessive pronouns and reviewed which pronouns are appropriate to use in which part of the sentence. Also thrown into the mix was a little diagramming and some letter writing. She's continuing to read The Children's Homer and Age of the Fable. In the former, she's begun the section on the Odyssey. In the latter, she got a quick two chapter review of the Iliad.

Violet struggled with her spelling test this week, so we decided to redo the lesson. In grammar, she's still covering verb forms. This week introduced a few helping verbs and discussed which form of a verb should be used in conjunction with them. She worked with the helping verbs do, does, and did as well as has, have, and had along with a select number of main verbs including come and came or go and went. For handwriting, she still copying Christmas carols. She finished up "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" and began copying "Infant Holy, Infant Lowly". For literature, she reached the part of The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles where Jason is performing a number of tests for the king to try to earn the fleece. She also read another chapter in both The Red Fairy Book and The Complete Peterkin Papers.

Benny finished up working on words ending in -ing, -ang, -ong, and -ung. We spent a couple of days adding -ing to other three or four letter words (ie. helping, fishing, etc.) Friday we started a new page with the endings -ink, -ank, and -onk. For handwriting, I used his memory verse from Sunday school ("Today in the town of David a Savior has been born, he is Christ the Lord.") for copywork for the entire week by breaking it down into a few words each day. This allowed us to both accomplish our handwriting and begin introducing the idea of memory work before I give him a memory box next fall. We used the girls' CW time to do lots of reading this week. In addition to more chapters from Surprise Island and fables from Winter's Aesop's Fables, we read the Pooh story where they are hunting for Small and Pooh and Piglet end up in a pit along with Potter's "The Tale of Timothy Tiptoes".

HISTORY

For Old Testament history this week, we continued in 1 Samuel learning about King Saul and the troubles of David during his reign. We have a couple of more stories/chapter to cover next week before we assemble our notebooking pages.

In ancient history, our topics were the Mycenaeans, the Trojan War, and the Odyssey. Jessie wrote a three paragraph summary about the Mycenaeans covering who they were, why they were considered both warriors and traders, and possible reasons for the decline of their civilization. She also did a map showing the extent of Mycenaean influence at the peak of their civilization. For the Trojan War, she read several chapters from The Story of the Greeks covering the events of the Iliad. She wrote down brief descriptions of the key events, which went on her notebooking page along with pictures I found on the internet. Both girls drew pictures of the Trojan horse using the Draw and Write book and completed a simple map showing the location of the events. Violet read the story of Odysseus from Usbourne's Greek Myths for Young Children and wrote a summary for her notebook page. Their new timelines figures were the Mycenaeans, the Trojan War, the Greek alphabet, and Homer. Benny and I continue to work through the Greek myths book simply enjoying the stories.

GEOGRAPHY

For geography this week we covered Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

SCIENCE

The girls read and completed booklets for lessons 11 and 12. That finishes up our Botany study with the exception of assembling the lapbook.

LATIN / LOGIC

Jessie completed another lesson in LfC B covering ordinal numbers this week. She has finished her first Think-a-Grams book for logic and is close to finishing her second Mind Benders book.

OTHER

Henry had a blast on Tuesday while I cleaned out the closet. I had put all of the plastic bottles into what is normally our toy basket in the living room. Henry proceeded to plop down beside the basic and began moving the bottles one at a time to the stools which just happened to be right next to the basket. Once the basket was empty he loaded it back up. After a few times back and forth he decided that it worked better if he sat in the basket while loading and unloading.
Finally, he decided to unload the basket completely. Violet climbed in the "boat" with him while Benny pushed them back and forth.