Week 20: Adjusting to Changes

It's been a crazy week. We finally got a new computer on Sunday. I spent three mornings trying to download the virus software update (68MB on dialup is no fun), but I finally succeeded on Wednesday and did a little happy dance around the room. Jessie and I have been working on how to get around on the new desktop and find things in the new Word program. She's not as ingrained with the old software as I am, so she's catching on much faster. Now I just have to get the typing program set back up for her, and hopefully get the old files off the hard drive of the old computer. (Thankfully almost all of my homeschooling files are on a flash drive.) Here's our week.

MATH

Jessie finished up the last review exercise in her 5A workbook as well as the end of semester review in her 5A IP book. She's excited to be halfway through her math program for the year and ready to start the 5B books next week. Overall she did very well on the review. There were a few careless mistakes here and and there and the usual couple of problems that require a second look from Mom to figure out. ( At least they're not too hard once my brain wakes up for the morning.)

Violet has been working steadily through the money unit at the end of the 3A textbook and workbook. Most days she actually went ahead and started the workbook pages on her own without a lesson from Mom. ("It's just adding/subtracting", she tells me. "I don't need any help.") There were a few borrowing mistakes which prompted a quick review, but otherwise she has done an excellent job without me teaching any of the concepts from the textbook, generally finished well ahead of schedule for the morning.

Benny has continued working on the adding and subtracting section of Miquon Orange without any help from me this week. In Singapore 1A, he began the unit on subtraction within 10 in the IP. Basically, I read the directions for him and helped him stay on task. (The IP assignments tend to be a little longer than the regular workbook ones.) He's also been having DH write out a series of numbers for him to practice copying. I'm not sure what gave him the idea, but he's worked very hard on it.



LANGUAGE ARTS

In spelling, Jessie successfully completed her second lesson in SWO H. Monday, she took the unit test on pronouns for grammar. The rest of the week was spent in the new unit on adjectives. I understand why they gave her the four question (which, whose, how many, and what kind of) to help her find adjectives. I'm not sure what the purpose of classifying adjectives as either descriptive or limiting is when they're diagrammed the same way. In CW, she completed her rough draft of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit", edited it, and finalized her story. Hopefully, next week we can get on track to both analyze and write the story in a week. In literature, she's still not thrilled with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but she finished it on Friday. In Age of the Fable, she finished reading about Aeneas and read a chapter which discussed the Egyptian gods and goddesses.

Violet's spelling continues to go well. She completed another 1 1/2 lessons this week. In grammar, we worked a little more with direct objects before switching topics to discuss paragraphs. Two days were spent rearranging sentences within a paragraph into the correct order. The third day, we discussed what a topic sentence was and how the other sentences relate to it, and then she applied the knowledge by finding the topic sentence in a paragraph and crossing out sentences that didn't belong. In CW, she completed her rewrite of "The Hare and the Tortoise". She also completed reading The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Before Achilles for literature.

Benny and I continued to work on the long a sound. He still automatically uses the short sound, and I have to tell him to use the long sound. I think there is at least one page in the Pyramids book that we can read next week. We may need to do some practice with the letter magnets as well. His copywork for this week was "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star".

HISTORY / ART

In Old Testament history this week, we continued with the story of King David. The girls each completed a map showing the kingdom of Israel under Saul and the land added under David. Violet finished her readings on David and added to her notebook. Jessie has a day or two of reading next week in order to finish up her David summary.

In ancient Greece, this week we visited Athens. The girls completed summaries of Draco, Solon, and Pisistratus. They also read about the lives of women and children in ancient Greece. Jessie wrote a couple of paragraphs, while I had Violet just list 5 things she found interesting. For maps, they both marked Athens, and Jessie also colored in Attica. There were lots of timeline figures for this week and last. The girls added Lycurgus, the rise of Sparta, the Olympics, Draco, Solon, Pisistratus, and democracy in Athens. Benny and I looked at a few pages in his coloring book on life in ancient Greece covering the gymnasiums and the Olympics. The other book I had scheduled wasn't available, and I missed doing the Athens pages Wednesday since I was concentrating on keeping the computer online and downloading.

No art this week.

GEOGRAPHY

We started our study of Africa this week by having each of the girls build our Middle East & Africa puzzle. Now I really need to get cracking on those notebooking pages. DH also ironed out my markable map for me, and we put it back up on the wall. Each of the girls on their own went through and named as many of the countries as they could.

SCIENCE

This week we learned about the periodic table, metals, non-metals, and hydrogen. DH did the metals lab with the kids since wiring a flashlight bulb to a battery is more up his alley than mine. We were a bit hard-pressed to come up with items listing partially hydrogenated oils on their labels in our cabinet. Luckily DH insists on Ritz crackers and Peter Pan peanut butter. We waited to start the lab for non-metals on Friday since the egg was supposed to sit in fluoride toothpaste for three days. I'll tell you more about it next week.

LATIN / LOGIC

Jessie completed her normal logic work, as well as lesson 17 in LfC B. Violet tested for lesson 1 of LfC A on Tuesday and then started lesson 2. She's doing very well, but she needs to watch her spelling. She kept changing the stem of amo to amo instead of ama.

OTHER

Henry has donned DH's orange stocking cap every morning this week right after breakfast before heading off on an adventure. Most of the adventures simply involved playing with siblings or trying to sneak into Benny's room to play with the train track. Friday, he decided to test his climbing skills by climbing the piano down in the basement while his sister was in the bathroom. Needless to say DH and I weren't two thrilled with that expedition.