Week 34: Chugging Along

MATH

Jessie spent the entire week working on review exercises in the textbook.  She did an excellent job with all of these, and I am very pleased with how well her math skills have developed.  She also continued working with geometry for her CWP 6 book this week.  She hit the challenging problems on Wednesday.  They were definitely challenging.  The picture to the left was one we worked on together.  The green is my redrawing of the original diagram.  The red is our work (with a 102 that should say 112).  The problems do an excellent job of combining all the different elements learned into a overlapping diagram.

Violet has spent the week working on the decimal section of the IP text.  Overall she's done very well and has shown a good grasp of the concepts. 

Benny has been doing simple addition and subtraction with numbers up to 100.  Most of the problems this week focused on place value.  He would add or subtract either a multiple of 10 or a single digit number that did not require regrouping to a larger number.  Friday he completed problems like 34 + 7 where we practiced making ten to solve the problem.  In Miquon, he finished up the section on fractions and has started a new section that is a mixture of several different operations.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie complete her final lesson in CW Poetry for Beginners this week.  YEAH!!  One subject down!  She's close to halfway through CE1 already.  She's studying conjunctions in grammar and had the week off from literature.  (I forgot to write down the assignment.)

Violet has been working on capitalization this week in grammar and completed another spelling lesson in SWO F.  She did one last fable for CW Aesop in addition to her regular dictation and copywork.  For literature she finished Pippi in the South Seas.

Benny completed his regular phonics and copywork and read The Dragon and the Gruesome Twosome by Robertson.  For literature, we continued with The Schoolhouse Mystery  by Warner and will most likely finish it this afternoon when he comes back inside for a bit.

 HISTORY

This week in history we remained focused on Elizabethan England covering Sir Francis Drake, the Spanish Armada, and Sir Walter Raleigh.

 Jessie read The True Story of Francis Drake by Holwood and completed a biographical summary.

 She outlined the chapter on the Spanish Armada from Miller's The Story of the Renaissance and Reformation and read Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada by Winwar to get an overall view of Elizabeth's reign.  Her summary of Sir Walter Raleigh was based on a chapter of the Miller book as well as Walter Raleigh by Syme.

Violet and Benny used SOTW 2 to cover the Spanish Armada and Walter Raleigh.  Our only activities for the week were the mapwork and coloring page.

SCIENCE

Jessie began God's Design Properties of Matter this week completing the four lesson of unit one and her crossword review.

 She tested the heat conduction of metal, wood, and plastic by measuring how long it took to melt butter on them.  We actually ended up moving the objects to a pot on the stove to get the butter to melt.

 She practiced using the scientific method by setting up a control of water and yeast to compare with a bottle also containing sugar and one also containing molasses.

She also worked with metric units finding a container that what hold 1 liter and estimating the weight of a pencil using paper clips which weigh roughly 0.5 grams each.

We also began God's Design Our Weather and Water this week talking about weather, the atmosphere, and air.

Here we have a candle attached to a plate of water by some clay.

As the oxygen is used up inside the glass, it draws up the water level in the glass to a higher level than the surrounding plate.

To show that air has weight, we taped two empty balloons to a yard stick so that they balanced.  Then we blew up one balloon, taped it back to the yard stick, and watched the air filled balloon side dip slightly lower.

HENRY'S CORNER

Among his many interests for the week, Henry wanted to join in on the school work (meaning use dry erase markers like everyone else).  Yes, that is blue dry erase marker on his cheek, and he's very proud of his "work".