Week 4: Moving Along

It's been a bit of a crazy week. I spent last weekend and the first couple of days this week getting clothes ready for our local consignment sale, so I wasn't very focused on school. Still we managed to muddle through most of our work on Monday and Tuesday so that by Friday morning we just needed to catch up a couple of science lessons on top of our normal work to be caught up. Here's a look at our week.


MATH


Jessie finished up the second unit in Singapore 6A and the corresponding IP unit on three-dimensional figures this week. On Friday, she started unit 3 on ratios.


Violet finished up the first unit in Singapore 4A IP. By midweek, she began the second unit in the textbook on multiplication and division of whole numbers. It's been a basic review of multiplication and division skills with a little rounding thrown in to mix it up.


Benny moved on to the Singapore 1A unit on subtraction this week as well as the subtraction section of the Miquon Orange book. We're still covering several lessons a day at this point, but the review is helping to build his confidence as well as giving him a bit of extra practice. I think he'll be ready to start some math drill next week.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed her last CW assignment for level 6 using "The Trial of the Bow" from The Children's Homer as well as another lesson in SWO H. She continued working with compound subjects, predicates, and sentences for grammar and wrote a book report for The Lantern Bearers, her literature selection from last week. Her literature and history was combined this week.

Violet finished reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and began Heidi this week. We're still using The Magician's Nephew for our dictation, and I forgot to get any cursive copywork ready again. She completed lesson 3 in SWO F, took the test for her first grammar unit, and started the second unit of R&S4. Her CW assignment for the week was to rewrite The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and illustrate it.

Benny finished phonics words that end in -ink, -ank, and -unk and began working on long vowel sounds again in Phonics Pathways this week. He read another 4 Bob books and completed 2 pages per day in Explode the Code 1. For copywork, he wrote out his Bible memory verses from Sunday school for the past two weeks. In literature, we continue to work our way through Little Pilgrim's Progress and Mystery Ranch.

LATIN and GREEK

Jessie completed 2 pages per day in The Greek Code Cracker and finished lesson 3 in LfC C. Violet began learning to decline first declension nouns by completing lesson 3 of LfC A.

HISTORY

This week in history was all about King Arthur. I briefly put him in the proper historical context for the kids, and then we all had fun reading the stories.

Jessie read Sutcliff's King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, The Light in the Forest, and The Road to Camlann. She outlined the chapter about King Arthur and completed a map of Britain using The Story of the Middle Ages. Her essay assignment was similar to last week. I asked her to come up with adjectives to describe King Arthur and one of his knights (she chose Sir Gawain) and to support her adjective choices with examples from the Sutcliff books.
Violet, Benny, and I read several library books together including: Arthur and the Sword by Sabuda, Excalibur by Talbott, King Arthur and the Round Table by Talbott, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Hastings, The Knight of the Lion by Hieatt, and pages of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by Williams covering the quest for the grail.

They made King Arthur paper dolls.

All three created edible versions of the sword in the stone. We used a scoop of non-dairy ice cream and coated it in Magic Shell chocolate ice cream topping. Then we squashed 2 Hershey's kisses together for the anvil. For the sword, we flattened a straw, cut a point in one end, and attached a twist tie to make the handle.

Finally, I hid a cup with some Hershey Kisses in Benny's room and sent them off to find the grail.

SCIENCE

Jessie finished up lesson 2 of her anatomy book by creating a chart of the different types of joints and putting together models of 3 of those joints using The Body Book. She scored a 100 on her vocabulary crosswords and a 94 on her chapter 2 test.

Chapter 3 covers the muscular system. She read about 2/3 of the chapter on Thursday and Friday completing a combination of outlines and summaries of the material. We also built two paper models of muscles: one was folded like an accordion so it could contract and relax, and the second demonstrates the bicep muscle contracting to move the arm.

The kids also had a blast this week with astronomy. We covered meteors, an overview of the solar system, and the sun.
They had a blast bombarding our lego village with meteorites of various size ranging from salt

to marbles

to golf balls.

Then Violet and Benny took out the houses and experimented with the best way to make craters in the flour with the golf ball. It made for a very messy floor, but they had a great time.

We also put together a solar system mobile from our Thames & Kosmos kit and used a prism to separate out the different colors of sunlight.

HENRY'S CORNER

I didn't have a lot of structure for Henry this week, so in addition to playing with his siblings and hanging out with DH on Monday and Thursday, here are a couple of his other excursions for the week.

He thought he'd get in some typing practice.

He thought Benny's sandwich looked tastier than his crackers, so he helped himself when Benny got up from the table. Violet then helped him make the sandwich even better by sticking crackers in between the bread with the peanut butter.