Week 8: A Quiet Week

Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie completed her 4th chapter of Foerster's algebra this week and scored another A on her test. Even though it's taking her longer to complete her assignments than I believe it should, at least I can confidently say she is understanding the concepts. Friday, she began learning about polynomials in chapter 5.
• She completed her 7th lesson in vocabulary and made further progress in the section on mechanics in Rod & Staff.  This weeks topics included colons, semicolons, using single quotes, and quotations across paragraphs.
• It's been a light week for CW.  After 2 final days on encomiums, she's spent three days reading a portion of "Antigone" and summarizing this plot.  She's also making steady progress in Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan and Ivanhoe by Scott.
• The first half of Latin this week included working with the first unit reading and completing her first unit test.  On Thursday, she began lesson 6 and began learning about comparative and superlative adjectives in Latin.  In EG3, she actually started declining third declension nouns and translating sentences with them.
• For geography, she's still working on Europe using the online site.  Her memory work is a continuation from last week.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet spent most of her week working with percentages about half of which were in the form of word problems.  She's also been cruising along in her CWP 6 book.
• In R&S grammar, she completed the unit on nouns and began her 4th unit on verbs.  She again did very well on her spelling.
• In CW, she had her final week of writing a story backwards using the tale of Robin Hood and Alan-a-Dale as a model.  In literature, she wrote a summary of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and read "Rip Van Winkle".
• Latin grammar was a review of the present tense verb system.  She began her first week of Elementary Greek 1 with a review of a portion of the alphabet.
• I don't think she did geography this week.  Her memory work was also a continuation from the previous week.

Benny's 3rd Grade

• Benny began learning to multiply two digit numbers by a single digit number this week in Singapore.  He did a great job.  He completed hiis regular Miquon and CWP pages as well.
• In grammar, he's been working with common versus proper nouns over the past several lesson and did very well with his Friday review lesson.  He continues to cruise along with SWO.  We rewrote "Androcles and the Lion" for CW.  We did some more focused editing this week working with word variety and pronoun clarity.
• Benny finished reading Dolphin Treasure by Grover and began James and the Giant Peach by Dahl.  We also completed our read aloud, Sharp's The Rescuers.
• In geography, we finished our California and Colorado booklets and began Connecticut.

HISTORY

It was classical composers week for history.  The girls wrote a paragraph on Beethoven after reading Beethoven by Blackwood.  They also read Her Piano Sang by Schumann and three books by Venezia:  Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin, and Peter Tchaikovsky.  They wrote a few brief sentences on each and mapped the countries of their birth.  Benny and I read an additional Venezia book Ludwig Van Beethoven.  He gave narrations of the four Venezia books and also mapped their countries.  We took the week off from hands on projects although the kids listened to some unscheduled classical music of their own accord.

SCIENCE

Jessie spent the week in chapter 5 of BJU physical learning about gravitational forces. While she seemed to understand the concepts based on the review questions in the book, the extra problems on Friday did not go at all well and showed a fundamental lack of understanding. We're going to try a spending some time over the weekend going over those topics a second time. We may or may not need to back up and review the previous chapters.

Violet and Benny learned about exothermic versus endothermic reactions, factors that change reaction rates, and the role of catalysts and inhibitors. In the picture Violet is adding hydrogen peroxide to a slice of potato which then became covered in bubbles as the enzyme in the potato broke the peroxide into water and oxygen.

OTHER

Art is in the previous post.  Benny listed to Hallelujah Handel and Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery this week for music.  The girls and I will be covering Bach and Handel first thing in the morning.

We managed 4 days of Spanish.  This week I taught them how to say goodbye and how to ask someone how they are doing and how to respond to that.  We also covered asking for names and stating our own names.  Next week we'll focus on putting these together in sequence to have a mini conversation.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I focused on chicken and grain this week. We read Galdone's The Little Red Hen, From Grain to Bread by Mitgutsch, French's Henny Penny, and From Egg to Chick by Nelson.  We spent the week reviewing our current letters and numbers and finding new things to practice counting to twenty.

We're going to make some bread and applesauce together tomorrow, but otherwise, he wasn't interested in any crafts this week except some cutting.  The lion face came from a different book and while it wasn't difficult cutting, there was more of it and he worked very diligently to get it finished.