Week 23: Scattered Again

Another week, another weekend storm in the forecast. As before, we had to try to juggle finishing schoolwork and running errands this week. The fact that there were a lot of deals spread over many stores because of the Super Bowl only added to the challenge. We didn't accomplish a lot of science, and Benny only got 3 days of read alouds. Everything else was finished.


MATH

Jessie finished up the textbook portion of the decimals this week and began working on the corresponding section in the IP book. She is doing very well so far. Most of the mistakes I've found are simple computational errors and even those are fewer and farther between than they have been. Somehow I missed taking a picture of her work, so the picture on the left is from her CWP assignments. This week in CWP she started the unit on angles after finishing up I think it was ratios.



Violet's focus this week has been on mental math. She's practiced adding and subtracting by breaking numbers up either into tens and ones or into another combination that makes the problem simpler. She has also been multiplying or dividing with numbers that are multiples of 10 or 100 (ie. 60x3 or 400/2). She has done very well with the addition and subtraction. She is still struggling a little bit with the multiplication and division because she hasn't memorized her multiplication facts yet, but I'm starting to see some improvements in her computation.


Benny has started a new section in his Singapore 1A books on ordinal numbers. We've been working through the books together with me reading the instructions for him. He had a little trouble keeping straight left and right on the 3rd day of math when all of the problems were x places from either the left or right, but we got through them. In Miquon, he's still doing different variations of adding and subtracting. Friday's lessons introduced the idea of skip counting. It had a number line and asked if you started at 0 and moved so many red (2) or green(3) blocks where you would end up. He did a great job working through the page on his own.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie spent part of her grammar time this week working with adverbs and the other days doing a few assignments related to poetry including rhyme and rhythm patterns and the use of similes and metaphors. Her CW model this week was "The Face That Launched 1000 Ships". We're finally at step 5 of the six sentence shuffle. I briefly thought about switching to the Poetry for Beginners book for a few weeks but decided that we would finish the Homer lessons first and save the easier poetry assignments for the end of the year. At this point I think it is still in rough draft form, so we need to edit it this afternoon or tomorrow. Her spelling lesson had lots of words with double consonants, and I confess even I had to double check a few times when I thought she had misspelled a word to make sure I was correct. I was very happy on Friday when she only misspelled 2 words on her final test. In literature, she's now reading The Hobbit five days a week and counting down the days until she finishes so that she can reread the book for fun. She was also asking if she could read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when she finished. I told her I was saving those books for school next year. At first, she was disappointed, but then I suggested she could read Robinson Crusoe next (which she's been asking about for year). Now I just have to read the book, so we can have an intelligent discussion on it.

Violet completed her spelling lessons with flying colors. In grammar, she continued to learned more about adjectives and the questions they answer. In CW Aesop, it was analysis week for her model, "Julius Caesar". We discussed legends, didn't find any vocabulary, identified nouns, and skipped the dictation due to time constraints (and the fact that Henry ripped her check sheet making it hard to read the assignments). In literature, she's finally started The Children's Homer. I have her going through at a slower pace than Jessie did. This week that made the readings very easy, but I think it will help her when the actual story of the Iliad starts and she gets bombarded with a lot of characters in a short period of time.

Benny and I focused on the long o sound this week. I've also decided to start having him read through the Bob books a second time starting with the A1 series for review although we only squeezed in one this week because I made exercise a priority and didn't get an early start. For his read aloud, we squeezed in 3 days of reading. We started Charlotte's Web and have almost caught up with Violet with the Bible readings. A lot of the other Greek readings fell by the wayside, but we'll try to catch up with those next week. We did manage three days of copywork as well.

HISTORY / ART

In Bible history, Jessie finished up with Elijah and started on Elisha and the kings of Israel and Judah during that period. I had her chart the kings just like last with their name, the choices or actions, the consequences, and her evaluation of what kind of king they were. Violet is a little bit ahead of Jessie and spent the entire week on Elisha. I've started typing up her daily narrations. We're having a bit of a battle with them because she is providing almost no detail, so we had a discussion Friday where I explained what I expected and that the consequence for sloppy narrations (either oral or written) would be that they must be redone.

In ancient Greece, we covered the Peloponessian War and the rise of Sparta. Jessie's reading and summaries included Alcibiades (which discussed the events of the war), Socrates, and Xenophon. Violet's also included the Spartan leader Lysander. Jessie completed a map showing the allies and neutral kingdoms during the war. Timeline figures included Elisha, Socrates, Alcibiades, and the Peloponessian War.

No art this week.

SCIENCE

We made marshmallow models of water molecules to go with Friday's lesson on covalent bonding. We read the text on metallic bonding but have not made the models for that lesson yet.

LATIN / LOGIC

Jessie has almost finished the next lesson. We will definitely finished either this evening or tomorrow. (Right now I let her have a break to play out in the snow. Apparently shoveling the front walk qualifies as play.) Violet has finished lesson 3. Her spelling in Latin is atrocious, and I made her go back and fix every single spelling mistake this week. Hopefully, she's gotten the idea and will be more careful next week.

OTHER

Henry has been into everything this week. I didn't actually get a picture of him doing anything, so I thought I'd share a couple of pictures that he took with my digital camera of the dog's fur and his feet in his pajamas.