Weeks 19 & 20 Upper

Jessie's 9th Grade

GEOMETRY: Jessie completed her midterm review and exam scoring an A then moved on to chapter 9 covering area.

GREAT BOOKS: She finished up her essay on Homer's Odyssey and completed a context page for Sophocles Theban trilogy of Greek tragedies. Then she had a couple of days break while we are waiting to receive the Vandiver lectures on Greek drama.

ENGLISH: She continues to work slowly through the CW section on the analytical essay, is reading MacDonald's Phantastes for literature, and completed another review test and quiz in vocabulary.

LATIN: She completed lesson 25 and the chapter quiz and began working on chapter 26 in Latin Alive 2.

SPANISH: In chapters 17 and 18 of BJU Spanish 1, she studied vocabulary related to airports and sports; object pronouns; and the verbs gustar, jugar, tocar, and saber.

HISTORY: Her Foundations of Western Civilization lectures covered Greek philosophers and the rise of Alexander. Her Western Civilization pages covered the same topics as well as daily life in ancient Greece, while her History of the Ancient World chapters also covered China in the 3rd century BC.

SCIENCE: She finished and tested for chapter 7 and did a quick read of chapter 8 with no notes or test.

MUSIC APPRECIATION: She listed to a lecture on the Baroque concerto as well as 3 Handel CDs and one Vivaldi.

Violet's 7th Grade

MATH: Violet completed the tests for chapters for chapters 4 and 5 in NEM and began working on the 6th chapter.

ENGLISH: Her grammar covered indefinite, relative, and interrogative pronouns; writing a report from an outline and an oral report; a chapter test on pronouns; and some adjective review at the beginning of the next unit.She's making steady progress in the second Caesar's English book covering through chapter 4 and also completed the 4th unit in CW. For literature, she tried and disliked Bulfinch's The Age of the Fable, so we downloaded Guerber's Myths of Greece and Rome onto her Kindle the first weekend to began reading during the second week. She is much happier with the Guerber selection.

LANGUAGES: She completed chapter 15 in Latin Alive 1 as well as most of chapter 16. Her Greek chapters for the weeks were 18 and 19 of EG 2.

HISTORY: In history, she covered the battles between Athens and Sparta as well as the golden age of Athens using The Story of the Greeks.

SCIENCE: She finished up plants and the first BJU Life Science text and began learning about invertebrates in chapters 15 and 16.

ART: She completed the hawk and flower painting shown in the creative corner posts during this time period.

Weeks 19 & 20 LG:

BENNY'S 4th GRADE

BIBLE: Benny covered the New Testament stories from the angel appearing to Zechariah to Jesus choosing his disciples.

MATH: He finished up the final review section of the 4A IP book and reach the official halfway point in math. He began working with decimals in the 4B text and workbook.

CRITICAL THINKING: He's been sorting shapes by categories in Building Thinking Skills 2 and also completed 2 more Mindbenders puzzles and advance Rush Hour puzzles.

LANGUAGE ARTS: In SWO E, Benny completed lessons 17, 18, and most of 19. He's been working through the unit on pronouns in R&S 4 covering subject pronouns, object pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns. For CW, he narrated the fable "he Lark and Her Young Ones" and analyzed "The Sick Lion" as well as completing his dictation and cursive copywork.

In literature, he finished the final book in Osbourne's Odyssey series and began The Island Stallion by Farley. As a read aloud, we quickly finished The Golden Key by MacDonald and started The Adventures of King Midas by Banks for a fun change of pace.

LATIN:  In LfC A, he completed chapter 18 which was a review lesson and then learned about the future tense of verbs.  We also started using the Latin History Reading, which he isn't thrilled about, but we're working through the lessons together.

HISTORY: Benny and I covered 3 chapters of SOTW 1 during the past two weeks. Topics included the Medes and the Persians, life in ancient Sparta and Athens, and the Greek gods. We did the corresponding mapwork as well as narrations of each of the topics for the notebook pages.

SCIENCE: In Zoology 3, we read about peccaries and moved on to a new chapter introducing reptiles and read several sections relating to snakes.

ART: See the previous Thursday posts.

HENRY'S K

In Phonics Pathways, Henry worked on 4 letters words with short vowel sounds. We mostly covered a half a page per day, but he did manage a full page a couple of times as well. We tried doing some of the first Explode the Code book, but I'm not sure that he's really ready for the amount of writing involved on some of the pages, so we may drop it for a few months. He learned to write the letters E through H in both upper and lowercase forms and did a couple of days of reviewing previous letters as well. For read alouds, we finished Surprise Island and moved onto the third book in the Boxcar children series, The Yellow House Mystery by Warner.

We've also continued our daily Bible reading covering from the boy Samuel through the anointing of David as king.

Math is still fairly simple: reviews of skip counting and one or two pages of Miquon Orange per day. His favorite page was the dot to dot pictured. There were also some patterning pages and pages of counting and writing numbers. He continues to enjoy his critical thinking books, and science has been a big hit. Over the past two weeks, we've read about polar bears, predator and prey, snowy owls, wolverines, beavers, and wolves.

Creative Corner: A Hawk, Figurines, and fun painting

Violet completed this sketch of a hawk using Hammond's Lifelike Drawing.

Benny asked to be allowed to paint the two Cars figurines that he received for Christmas,

and Henry (determined not to be left out) broke out the washable paint on his own to make the above creations.

Creative Corner: Flower Painting and watercolor snowman

Violet completed this flower using Hammond's Acrylic Painting.

Benny chose this watercolor snowman with the bird,

and Henry decided to give it a try as well.

Week 18 Upper:

GEOMETRY: Jessie completed the review sets at the end of chapter 8 covering transformations, scored her first perfect score on the chapter test, and began working on the midterm review sets this week.

GREAT BOOKS: This week's assignment was to pick a thesis, write an outline, and turn it into a five paragraph essay on Homer's Odyssey. We briefly discussed plot, character, and theme using Teaching the Classics; but I felt like I could keep the discussion brief since the Vandiver lectures that she listened to were excellent. She finished her rough draft, and I'll mark some changes for editing on Monday. The basic idea is there, but she needs to edit and add in some more detail and quotes to better make her point.

ENGLISH: I've decided that English as a subject was taking up too much time each day. For the next 6-8 weeks, she going to take a break from grammar and concentrate on finishing up CW Herodotus. This week's assignments were a mishmash of catch up work: a commonplace essay that hadn't been done, further developing a few paragraphs, and finishing out her final lessons from the week before break. It's not all done quite yet because she became sick on Wednesday, but we'll keep working on it over the weekend.

LATIN: She completed a quiz on chapter 24, completed the exercises in chapter 25 covering reflexive pronouns and possessive adjectives, and began working on the chapter reading. She also had a quiz on the present active and perfect active systems and reviewed the corresponding passive systems for next week.

SPANISH: Her Spanish covered vocabulary relating to months, seasons, and weather this week. She covered the conjugation of hacer and some of the idiomatic expressions for which it is used. She also covered some of idiomatic uses for tener, the conjugation of decir, and the use of decir plus que to introduce a clause. She received a high A on Friday's quiz.

HISTORY: She jumped back to cover lesson 10 in Foundations of Western Civilization about Greek culture and completed the corresponding section in Spielvogel taking notes and writing a paragraph answer to the focus question. She also read chapter 66 in Bauer's History of the Ancient World and chose Egyptian gods and religion for her first paper topic.

SCIENCE: Her assignment this week was to take notes on chapter 6 this week. She is currently finishing this up as I'm typing because her science falls on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. It was midweek when she became sick.

MUSIC APPRECIATION: She listened to two more Handel cds.

Violet's 7th Grade

MATH: Violet covered 5 more section in chapter 4 of NEM on decimals.

ENGLISH: She wrote her book report for The Fellowship of the Ring and began reading Age of the Fable by Bulfinch. She's not thrilled with it, so I may switch her to the Guerber myths if I can get it downloaded from project Gutenburg. She began the second Caesar's English book and passed her first vocabulary test. In R&S she worked with personal, demonstrative, and indefinite pronouns. She also completed a lesson on organizing notes for a paper. In CW, she spent the week analyzing one of Benjamin Franklin's articles for the Spectator.

LANGUAGES: In Latin, she passed her quizzes on chapters 13 and 14 and reviewed third declension adjectives in lesson 15. For Greek, we took the week to catch up on vocabulary and grammar memory work.

HISTORY: Violet covered the Greek battles against Darius and Xerxes at Marathon, Thermophylae, Salamis, and Plataea reading chapters 45-53 of Guerber's The Story of the Greeks. She wrote 2 paragraph summaries and a longer 3 paragraph one.

SCIENCE: Violet worked on chapter 14 in BJU Life Science this week. This is the last chapter in the first book. Yeah! Almost halfway there. I had planned to do some catch up labs, but with Henry sick I ended up sitting and snuggling with him instead. We'll try again next week.

FINE ARTS: Art is in Thursday's post. No music for Violet either because I forgot to check out the book.

Week 18 LG: Homer, the Olympics, and Giraffes

Both boys were sick for part of the week, but they still managed to complete all of their scheduled school work. I made sure that I worked twice each day with Henry, which he was very excited about. Overall they had a great week despite being sick.

Benny's 4th Grade

BIBLE: Benny has been steadily reading one story per day from the Vos Bible book although I haven't been including it in the weekly reports. This week he read about Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

MATH: Benny finished up his IP section on area and perimeter and completed the final review exercises in his 4A textbook and workbook this week. In CWP 4, he was completing problems involving angles.

LOGIC: His BTS mostly involved description of overlapping figures. He also completed another Mind Benders puzzle and an advanced Rush Hour card.

ENGLISH: He wrapped up the final exercises of chapter 5 in R&S covering verb pairs like lay/lie, set/sit, and can/may and also completed the chapter test on Friday. He completed the 16th lesson in SWO E covering prefixes like fore- or pre- and began the 17th lesson. In literature, he finished the remaining 2 chapters of the 4th Odyssey book by Osbourne and read all of the 5th book. His CW analyzed the fable "The Lark and Her Young Ones". Together, we read the final chapters of Colum's The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles.

LATIN: Latin grammar covered the imperfect endings of verbs for chapter 17. Next week we'll finally be adding in the first Latin history reader as well.

HISTORY: We covered chapter 20 in SOTW reading about Homer and the Olympics, but skipped reading the Odysseus story found in the chapter since he's already covered it in literature. In addition to the corresponding mapwork, we also read part of In Search of Troy by Ventura and all of I Wonder Why the Greeks Build Temples and Other Things by MacDonald.

SCIENCE: In addition to giraffes (whose poor babies, we found out start life with a 6 foot fall onto their head), we read about Okapi and and overview of family Suidae.

ART: His bird in a cage watercolor is in Thursday's post. No music this week. I forgot to check the books out on Saturday.

Henry's K

I wanted more structure to Henry's time for the remainder of the year, and we are off to a good start. In math, we reviewed counting by 1s and 10s and he actually counted correctly by 5s for the first time. We also began doing some pages in Miquon Orange matching rods to the number of objects in a square, working on number identification, and even a bit of number writing. His BTS Primary is still working with patterns, and he's much happier completing those pages without the various blocks.

In the language arts area, Henry and I slowly worked our way through 2 pages of Phonics Pathways and also started the first Explode the Code book. We covered the pretest and the first 4 pages on the short a sound. Most of it was done orally, but I did have him write a few a's as well. For our read aloud, we picked back up with Warner's Surprise Island. I also drew writing lines on his draw erase board, and he practiced writing the letters A, a, B, b, C, c, D, and d.

Henry's also listening to Bible stories from Egermeier's Bible Story book. This week we read about Samson and Ruth. I'm counting this as both Bible and history although he does sometimes listen in with Benny for SOTW 1. I also dug out an old workbook on animals to read to him. The animals are grouped by region and starts appropriately enough with the Arctic and Antarctic. We read about caribou, lemmings, ermines, musk ox, and orcas this week. I picked a couple of questions from below the text to ask him about (giving him multiple choice when needed). He also made a paper bag reindeer. Our bag was white, so he painted it brown. We cut his hand prints out of light brown cardstock (since we were out of construction paper) and used them for antlers. Then we added paper eyes and a nose. He also did a bit of Kumon each day.

Creative Corner: A Pot and a Bird in a Cage

Violet chose this pot project from Acrylic Painting by Hammond,

while Benny completed this watercolor bird in a cage using these directions.