Week 27: A partial breather

Everyone has a limit to how much they can juggle at one time, and I reached that limit last weekend. Not only did I need to do the normal school prep for the month, but my to do list also included prepping items for our local consignment sale, finishing the taxes and mailing them off (Yes, I actually use paper because it's free.), picking themes for the girls' birthday parties and mailing out invitations, and making the list for the normal beginning of the month run to WalMart. I managed the first two, still need to do the third, and have made 3 trips to town this week because I didn't do the last one which only added to the chaos. Here's a look at our crazy week. I'm definitely looking forward to a calmer week starting Monday.

MATH


Jessie finished up the percentage section in the IP book on Thursday. On Friday, she read through the textbook on her own while I was in the shower, taught herself how to average numbers, and successfully completed her workbook assignment as well. Honestly, I'm really proud of her initiative, and she did a great job.


Violet finished the IP section on length and has moved on to a section on weight in the textbook and workbook. Reading scales on the first day was brutal because she just didn't get that you have to figure out how much each of the marks on the scale is actually worth for each new scale. We finally made it through once she quit whining and breezed through the successive lessons covering converting between kg and g, adding and subtracting with kg and g, and some weight related word problems.

Benny continues to work in the section on number to 20 in his Singapore book. He had one more day with the 10 and x makes whatever concept, a day of counting forwards and backwards/filling in missing numbers, and a day of comparing numbers and arranging them in order either by increasing or decreasing value. His Miquon continues to be a combination of addition and multiplication on the same page to cement the relationship between the two operations. I don't remember the exact exercises since he completed them on his own.


LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed another spelling lesson with a perfect test. In grammar, she finally finished and tested for the unit on punctuation. In CW, she did analysis and rewrote "The Story of Damon and Pythias" after I realized that the models "Xenophon, to the Sea" and "The Retreat of the Ten Thousand" were the same story. I figured I just add another model using a scene from the Odyssey since that's what the next two models are anyway. That also finished here level 4 work, which means 4 more weeks of level 5 and on to poetry! (I guess I'd better move that up my to do list.) For literature, I've let her start reading Robinson Crusoe this week. She actually only read it two days because when she brought it to me on Tuesday to find out what to read, it got knocked into a desk drawer and lost for a couple of days.

Violet and I have begun to review her spelling. I skimmed through the levels B and C books, picked out the words I knew she still misspelled and had her work on those for a couple of days. Then we started through the level D lists. My plan is also to pull words from her written narration the rest of the year before restarting SWO F in the fall. In grammar, the lessons I remember from the week covered negative words, avoiding double negatives, and writing stories based on pictures. For CW Aesop, we analyzed "The Milkmaid and Her Pail". She also completed a full week of handwriting and read two chapters of The Children's Homer a day.

Benny and I completed one page of review with a combination of long and short vowel words in Phonics Pathways. Friday, for a change of pace, we read together prelevel 1 reader together called See Pip Point. The repetition of words does encourage guessing a bit, but it also let's us move through the story a little faster making it more fun for Benny. In handwriting, I just had him write the alphabet again this week. One change from last week is that I actually reminded him to write on the lines this time. We didn't squeeze in all of our regular read alouds since most of our errand running took place just before lunch during his read aloud time, but we did made some progress in both the Egermeier Bible book and Charlotte's Web.

HISTORY

History was where I chose to lighten up this week. Our Ancient Greece topic would have been Alexander the Great. I decided the topic was too important to just skim over which is what happens when lesson prep isn't done. Instead, the only history that was done this week was Biblical history. Jessie read about the last kings of Judah and covered portions of the book of Daniel. The kings were charted and a summary written of Daniel. Violet finished reading about Jeremiah and also read stories from Daniel with corresponding oral narrations. We'll put the actual notebooking pages together next week.

SCIENCE

We finished another unit in our chemistry book. We covered catalysts with a demonstration of using a potato slice to make hydrogen peroxide convert to water and oxygen. We covered inhibitors and used lemon juice on an apple slice as compare to a regular apple slice to demonstrate. The girls also read and answered questions on exothermic and endothermic reactions, but we chose to skip the hands on. I didn't want to waste 5 eggs on the endothermic demo and I didn't have any steel wool for the exothermic one. Somehow or another I also missed taking pictures.

LATIN

Jessie finished another lesson in LfC B. She learned the grammar chants for that and those. Violet is working on a review lesson (#5) in LfC A. They did complete their logic assignments. Jessie's started her last Mind Benders book, B4.

OTHER

Henry, as he always does when Mom is distracted, has been up to lots of mischief this week. He learned how to toilet paper my bathroom and covered his floor in packing peanuts. He decided to try my Diet Pepsi one day at lunch (happily the spill stopped at his clothes and high chair), tried to help with dinner by tearing the chili spice bag and coating my kitchen floor with chili pepper, and endeavored to help himself to seconds of pretzel sticks by turning the bag upside down and dumping the remaining contents on the dining room floor. On the constructive side, he ran several test on gravity by rolling one of his balls down a 2x4 ramp in the basement over and over and learned to say hot dog (even though he refused to try a bite of one).