Week 34: In sight of the finish line

It's been a beautiful week as far as weather. It's great to have the kids outside again. Between catching up on cleaning, trying to get Henry more time outside, and keeping school running I'm ready for a break. We aren't quite done yet, but at least we're starting to wrap up a few things.


MATH


On Monday, Jessie finished up the IP section on parallelograms, rhombuses, and trapezoids. Then she spent the remainder of this week on a new unit in the textbook and workbook on tessellations. Basically she had to figure out which figures could be used to form a tile pattern and which could not. She was given a few tiles on a dotted grid to draw the pattern out. It's been great for her to be able to use her extra math time to work on her other subjects to be able to finish early and head outside with everyone else. She's also excited that there is only one new unit left.


Violet finished up an IP section on fractions this week. She spent Wednesday through Friday completely various review exercises in the textbook and workbook. Violet is not quite as far along as Jessie in her math with 3 new units left, but hopefully that will all be fairly easy for her to complete.




Benny has had a light school week to help DH. Sunday he and DH helped a friend of ours cut down and clear away a tree, and he was very excited to get paid $7. Wednesday DH took him out for a hair cut, and Thursday and Friday he was helping DH with the cedar tree in our yard that DH cut down to allow more sunlight to reach our garden. As a result he only ended up doing 2 days of math, one in each text. Truthfully, I'm not worried about whether he finished the books this year or not, we'll just go however far we get and take it from there.


LANGUAGE ARTS


Jessie completed lesson 16 in SWO G leaving her two more to go for this year. In grammar, she finished up the last unit in R&S 5, so no more grammar for the year. In CW, we again combined weeks and completed the lessons for weeks 5 & 6. The day four imitation lesson had her take the nursery rhyme "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe", come up with a different rhyming word for the second line of each couplet, and then use that to create her own poem. She had a blast, and I enjoyed reading the result. In literature, she is making steady progress through The Bronze Bow by Speare and will probably have time for one more book this year.

Violet has been working on the last unit in her grammar text as well. Most of this week has been an introduction to poetry discussing using descriptive language, rhyme and rhythm. The poems on the write were from her Friday lesson where she was given two lines to start and then asked to finish the poem. We did complete 2 weeks worth of CW this week to both analyze and imitate the story "A Laconic Answer" which I believe came from The Story of the Greeks by Guerber. Handwriting continues to be copying from The Secret Garden with an emphasis on improving neatness and copying more carefully. For literature, she finished up the remaining stories in The Red Fairy Book. Next week, she'll start reading Vinegar Boy, which will likely be her last assigned reading for the year.

Benny and I did manage to do a full week of phonics. In Phonics Pathways we're working on adding -ing to CVC words. In the Bob books, we finished up the last two books from the A1 series and started the first 2 books from the B1 series. There is a bit of a jump from one to the next, so I just read the words that are irregular or that he hasn't learned how to decode yet.

HISTORY

In NT history, we're still reading through the ministry of Jesus. I don't know how many other weeks I have planned out, but I'm sure we will be continuing with history well into the summer at this point. I'm making a not to myself not to take as much time off history next year and to start it a week or two earlier rather than having it be one of the last subjects started.

In ancient Rome, we've switched back to using TruthQuest as our spine, since I never sat down to block it all out on my own. We're only about a third of the way through the guide, but I plan to continue to the end this time because a lot of the Roman history after Caesar Augustus Jessie and I only skimmed through the first time around. This week, we read about the three Punic wars and Hannibal. The girls drew a war elephant using the Draw and Write Through History book. Violet's map includes the locations of Rome and Carthage as well as the route followed by Hannibal. Jessie's map also shows Roman lands before and after the war. There were several timeline figures related to Rome from this week and last week added to the timeline as well.

LATIN / LOGIC

Jessie finished lesson 30 in LfC B and has two review lessons to cover before she finishes for the year. Violet has finished lesson 9 in LfC A. This is the last lesson for her for this year. I want to spend the summer working on vocabulary and getting her more comfortable with conjugating, declining, parsing, and translating using the words she has learned so far. Jessie has finished her last Mind Benders puzzle in the B4 book. That just leaves her Building Thinking Skills 2 and her Think-a-Grams A2 books which will probably take two more weeks. Violet has finished her Visual Perceptual Skill Building, Book 2 work this week and her last Mind Benders book as well.

OTHER

As far as Henry, it's all about getting outside this week. We've used some of Benny's math time to go out and play, and I try to have my work finished to take him out just after his nap as well. Our pair of geese has five little ones already, and Henry loves to watch them. It took some convincing, but I finally got him to say goose instead of duck when he sees them.