Week 6: A Dash of Chaos

It's been a bit of a chaotic week, which is normal when I'm tired and don't stay on top of what's going on in the house. I have managed to start a preliminary plan for the next three weeks, so I can focus next week on planning out some more history and science. We have a couple of things left to finish up this afternoon, but here's a look at our week.

MATH

Jessie finished up the textbook and workbook lessons on ratios and began the corresponding section in the IP book this week. I honestly don't know exactly what was covered because she's been reading the textbook lessons for herself this week. The workbook pages continued to be short and sweet, which gave her plenty of extra time for her hands on science work and a bit of free reading time. She also continues to work on the first section in the CWP 6 book and is doing very well with the problems.

Violet had a couple of review pages in the textbook and workbook this week before beginning the multiplication and division section of the IP book. Can I just say AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! Her careless errors drove me bonkers, but she did eventually get the problems correct. I haven't decided whether to continue on to fractions or do some more review next week. I guess I will most likely wait to see how she does with the word problems on Monday before making a final decision.

Benny finished the IP section on subtraction this week, began and completed the textbook and workbook section on ordinal numbers, and began the corresponding IP section on Friday. We also covered 6 more pages in his Miquon Orange book.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie finished up unit 2 in R&S 6 on Monday, spent two on nouns, and finished off with two days on paragraph development. She completed a review lesson in SWO H and finished reading The Sword and the Stone by White. We still need to complete our story chart and have our discussion, but I wanted to get this post done while Henry was asleep. In CW, she rewrote the story of the fall from Genesis backwards. I personally thought that there was a large block of chronological actions that could have been broken up, but she put a lot more effort into her draft this week than last so I kept my comments to myself this time. The picture on the right is one of her sentence shuffles for the week.

Violet has been covering sentence types and how to diagram them in R&S 4. She completed lesson 5 in SWO F. Her fable for the week was "The Ant and the Grasshopper". We switched our focus in CW this week to dialogue, which she did very well. In literature, she spent the week reading Augustine Came to Kent by Willard while we continued using The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for dictation and her memory work for cursive copywork.

Benny has nearly finished up the lessons covering long vowel sounds in Phonics Pathway. After reading the first two Bob books in the B series, I decided to switch to Pyramids for a few weeks because we were encountering too many words that he hadn't learned the rules for yet. He also completed another 10 pages in ETC 1. In copywork, he copied verse 3 of Psalm 23 and began copying the poem, "The Caterpillar" by Rosetti, which I introduce for memory work as well. We finished up the first half of Little Pilgrim's Progress covering Christian's journey and began the second half about Christiana while continue to work our way through The Happy Hollisters.

HISTORY

Jessie's reading this week included chapters from The Story of the Middle Ages and Trial and Triumph as well as Life in a Medieval Monastery by Cels. Instead of one longer writing project this week, we focused on well-formed paragraphs and did several shorter assignments covering Gregory, Augustine, Boniface, and monastic life. She also outlined one chapter which covered several other monks.

Violet, Benny, and I read chapter 3 in SOTW, which covers Pope Gregory sending Augustine to Briton, monasteries, and book making. Violet also read the chapter on Gregory from FMMA. We finished off Peril & Peace, by reading about Benedict. In Monks & Mystics, we read a chapter on Gregory at the time he became pope and another on how the pope got his name. We mapped the different routes that Augustine could have taken and completed a coloring page from the AG.

Additional books for the week covered Columba (Across a Dark and Wild Sea by Brown), Brendan (Brendan the Navigator by Fritz), and more detail on monastic life (Life in a Medieval Monastery by Cels). Benny's narrations covered just the material in SOTW, while Violet's included information from her FMMA reading and some additional information from the Cels book.

I wasn't too excited about the project ideas for the week, so we made having a monastery inspired supper into one big project. First, the kids and I went down to the grape arbor and picked as many grapes as we could find without getting stung by all the bees. We sorted out the good grapes, put them into the food mill my mil loaned us, and turned them into grape juice to drink.

Violet and Benny also helped me measure ingredients into our bread machine to make homemade bread. (It was just too hot to make it by hand and have to bake it in the oven.) For simple fruit and vegetables, we made apple slices and cucumber wedges. Then, since no one in my house would have eaten either of the soup choices in the activity guide, we decided to substitute scrambled eggs and just say that it was a holiday meal.

The grape juice turned out a little sour, but overall everyone enjoyed the meal.

SCIENCE

Jessie finished up lesson 4 on the digestive and renal systems this week. She did the usual combination of outlining and summarizing, labeled a diagram of the digestive system, and completed her vocabulary review crossword and test.

Her hands on for the week consisted of adding the digestive and renal systems to her skeleton (who has now been named Mr. Bones). Jessie and I were very proud of the effort, but Violet and Benny thought Mr. Bones looked gross with all of those organs.

In astronomy this week we finished up unit 3 on the sun and the moon by learning about the different phases of the moon and discussing the origin of the moon. Benny finished up his moon facts booklet and made a booklet of moon phases. The girls had a worksheet for the moon phases. We tried to spin a top representing the moon to a designated place next to the earth to illustrate one of the problems with the capture theory. Using our T&K kit, we assembled a flip book of the moon's phases. We were also supposed to illustrate how gravity holds the moon in place, but the kids apparently lost a piece from the kit last week when we made our model solar system.

ART

For art this week, I decided I needed to simplify things for Benny. Friday's lesson discussed different types of lines (vertical, horizontal, thick, thin, solid, dashed, intersecting, and angled). For our project, I took this idea from Art Projects for Kids, but I didn't limit the kids to patterns. The only rule was to use straight lines. (There were a couple of curved lines and dots in the final project, but overall I think it went very well.)

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry has been into everything this week from minor mischief like scribbling on unattended school work or disassembling his fishing rod to major messes like a living room floor covered in too many toys to walk or a broken canning jar downstairs. Needless to say, one thing that I have to do this week is sit down with the older kids and go back over some basic rules of playing with Henry and keeping him out of mischief. I think we'll also switch back to Mom assigning the toys so there is a little more variety to keep his interest. Of course it wasn't total chaos. He and Benny played tug-o-war with a jump rope one day. Jessie took him outside a couple of days, and there have been more train tracks built this week than I can remember. Still we'll need to work on some improvements for next week.