Wednesday, December 26, 2012

A Quiet Christmas


Checking out Santa's gifts before diving into a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and homemade cinnamon rolls and reading the Christmas story together
Henry, who has recently taken a renewed interest in VeggieTales, was very excited by his new video from my parents.
Benny's expression after opening his new Harry Potter game made all those hours on Ebay trying to find something in good condition at a reasonable price worthwhile.
Violet and Jessie were most excited about the gifts that cost me nothing at all:  permission to read the final Harry Potter book for the former and to watch the fourth movie in that series for the latter.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Week 17: Squeezing in a bit more...

Jessie's 8th Grade
  • Jessie continued to work with coordinate systems and linear equations this week in algebra. Her quiz initially didn't go very well, but she was able to find and correct her mistakes with no problem.
  • In CW, she focused on writing analogy paragraphs.  She completed her written paper on the Oregon trail for grammar as well as some her unit and test on verbs.  She has finished reading Pride and Prejudice, which we will discuss over break; but is well behind in her reading of The Count of Monte Cristo.  She did fairly well on lesson 15 in vocabulary.  We may need to take 2 weeks for review after break just to firm up all the word roots from the last 5 lessons before moving on.
  • She completed lesson 11 in Latin Alive except for the quiz and worked on imperfect and future passive indicative verbs in chapter 12.  Her Greek lesson was a review week.

Violet's 6th Grade
  • Violet spent the week working on review lessons in her textbook and workbook as she is nearly finished with the 6A books in math.
  • In grammar, she did some pronoun reviews.  She used "Twas the Night Before Christmas" for our CW model, successfully completed her spelling unit, finished reading Rascal and wrote a book report on it Friday.
  • She also completed a review lesson in LfC C and did some more simple sentence translations for Greek.

Benny's 3rd Grade
  • Benny completed his Miquon Yellow book and worked on multiplying and dividing by 9 in Singapore.
  • In R&S, he did some work with verb tense and number as well as choosing the correct verb for sentences starting with the word there.  He did well on his 5th spelling test and completed some Christmas song copywork.  We finished reading The Book of Three together, and he is about 2/3 through The Cricket in Time Square
HISTORY

The girls read 5 more chapters on the Civil War from Guerber as well as Ulysses S. Grant by O'Shei and William Sherman:  Union General by Remstein and wrote summaries of the contents.

Bennya and I read U. S. Grant:  Horseman and Fighter by Reeder and A Picture Book of Robert E. Lee by Adler.

No science this week in favor of Christmas cookie baking

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I just did the basics this week: reading Christmas books, reviewing letters, and counting (which is now one of his new favorite activities).

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

WW: Our Christmas Tree

The kids had a blast putting up the ornaments this year.  Even Henry got a chance to help.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Weeks 15 & 16: Trying to stay focused

Jessie's 8th Grade
  • Jessie has been working through chapter 7 of Foerster's Algebra over the past two weeks. She's been working with linear equations graphing them; determining slopes; and calculating x-intercepts, y-intercepts, and intersections between two lines.
  • She's successfully completed 2 more lessons in vocabulary.  Her grammar work has been focused on verbs:  active versus passive, transitive versus intransitive, etc.  She still owes me an oral report and a completed written report on the Oregon Trail as part of her grammar lessons.  She's making steady progress in reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice as well as Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.  Her CW work is a bit behind.  She finished her 3rd writing project last week and has been working on analogy paragraphs this week.
  • In Latin, she completed chapter 10 and her second unit reading and test last week.  This week she has been working through chapter 11 and learning about the passive mood of verbs.  In Greek, she had some more practice last week with future tense and had a review lesson this week.

Violet's 6th Grade
  • Violet completed her IP section of speed and has spent most of this week working on review pages in the textbook.
  • She completed her usual spelling lessons with flying colors.  She has also been working on verbs over the past two weeks.  This is her first introduction to passive versus active verbs.  She also completed her first "research" paper on alligators, which we'll do some more editing on next week.  For literature, she completed Tuck Everlasting and began reading Rascal this week.  In CW, she has been working with the model "The Wonderful Weaver", which tells the Greek myth about Arachne.  It's hard to believe she only has 4 more weeks left in CW Homer.
  • Over the last two weeks in Latin, she learned the future endings for the 3rd and 4th conjugation and was introduced to 3rd conjugation "io" verbs.  This week in Greek, she began translating her first (albeit short) sentences in Greek.
Benny's 3rd Grade
  • In Singapore, Benny worked on multiplying and dividing by 7 and then by 8 over the past two weeks.  He's been learning about exponents in Miquon.
  • He finished his grammar section on nouns and pronouns last week and began a new section on verbs.  He completed two more spelling lessons and his regular cursive copywork.  For CW, we analyzed "The Lion and the Mouse" last week and did a narration this week.
  • For literature, he completed The Family Under the Bridge and began The Cricket in Times Square.  Our current read aloud is The Book of Three by Alexander, which is the first book in the Chronicles of Prydain series.  He also completed his first Mind Benders book for the year this week.
HISTORY
We are working on the Civil War for history right now.   Rather than go battle by battle with individual books, I'm having the girls read from The Great Republic for the battles and then assigning biographies of notable people.

Last week the girls read from The Great Republic about the beginning of the war and the early life of Abraham Lincoln.  The also summarized Jefferson Davis:  Confederate President by Frazier.  This week, they outlined information on the Monitor and Merrimac, wrote a summary of Stonewall Jackson using Stonewall Jackson by Hewson, summarized the events of 1862 in The Great Republic, and wrote about the life of Admiral Farragut using David Glasgow Farragut by Latham.


Benny's only history book last week was Abraham Lincoln by D'Aulaire.  This week we read Duel of the Ironsides by O'Brien and David Glasgow Farragut by Latham.  All three books are excellent, and I would recommend them.  Henry enjoyed the O'Brien book and even had Jessie read it to him twice.

SCIENCE

Science has fallen temporarily by the wayside due to the time I've been spending working on Christmas shopping and decorating.  Jessie and I did finish discussing the material in chapter 5.  We still need to complete the lab, the review in the text, and the test. 

Violet, Benny, and I began reading Properties of Matter.  We've learned what matter is, the difference in qualitative and quantitative data, how the scientific method works, and discussed different instruments used in measuring.  We also read a brief biography of Lord Kelvin.  In the one experiment that we did complete, we placed butter on metal, wood, and plastic and then placed these items in hot water.
The metal won with the plastic a close second.

No music, art, or geography.

HENRY'S CORNER
Henry and I are spending the month reading Christmas books from our collection as well as any other books he chooses from the shelves.  We added the letters P and p to the magnets on the refrigerator.  Monday he decided to count the magnets and made it all the way up to 34 by himself with no mistakes.  YEAH!!

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

WW: 4yo Entertainment

 He turned his brother's mattress sideways to slide and roll down.
He also hid under the crib and called for the dog.  Jack always comes to look when Henry calls because he usually has a ball to throw.  Still he received plenty of petting for successfully finding Henry.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Creative Corner: Christmas tree


We didn't get to the gingerbread houses as yet, but Violet decided to draw a Christmas tree in the interim.  I thought it turned out very well.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

WW: Benny's Ocean Box

It took 6 months, but Benny finally convinced DH to help him put together his ocean box.  There are still 4 jellyfish to add, but DH was talking about drilling those.  Of course, it didn't stay like this very long.  Benny and Violet both spent several hours playing with the figures afterwards.