Week 35: Still wrapping up

It's been a fairly quiet week around here. Benny and I have been waging war on the various bugs attacking our garden plants. It was amazingly easy to knock the potato beetles off the plants and drop them in a bucket of soapy water yesterday. Today the smaller bugs on the squash and zucchini plants were mating so they didn't fly away, and we gave a few dozen more a dunking. The girls have had a lighter school week with fewer subjects. Here's a recap.

MATH

Jessie finished up the IP section on four sided figures and did a few review lessons for most of the week. Friday, she started the first lesson in the last section of the 5B textbook on volume. The new twist for this year is to see that volume equals area times height. She didn't get it with the illustrations, so I wrote down the area formula, put the volume formula underneath, and circled the overlap. Once the light bulb went on, she made short work of the workbook exercise.

I tried to double up lessons for Violet at the beginning of the week since she started a new unit on time, which I thought would be easy. Big mistake. By Wednesday she was guessing the answers, so we backed up and restarted the section one lesson at a time spending more time on the textbook lessons with me explaining how I solved the problems. So far so good. I also decided to temporarily throw in the towel on the CWP book for a few weeks after she was having problems with a couple of word problems in one of the review exercises at the beginning of the week. We're going to spend the summer working through the entire CWP book to make sure that we firm up the foundation of her work problem solving skills before next fall.
Benny is still working through the same addition and subtraction within 20 section in the IP book. His Miquon Orange book has gone MIA temporarily, but I'm hoping to locate it this weekend and put it back together. (Last I saw it the cover was completely off and had broken in two pieces.)

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie finished up another spelling lesson leaving only one review lesson for next week to finish off for the year. In CW, we're still doubling up on poetry lessons. Honestly, there's really not a whole lot of new material here. I think the only new info she's learned so far are the terms iambic and trochaic and how to count the feet in a line. For imitation on day 4, she had to write a heroic couplet. I picked Robin Hood, and she came up with the following:

See, Robing Hood gave money to the poor,

And Little John helped him do even more.

In literature, she finished reading The Bronze Bow. We're going to try to do the analysis on Monday before starting one last book.

Violet has finished up her grammar for the year. YEAH!! I'm still having her do copywork, which is becoming remarkable neater since I began making her recopy it when it was sloppy. In literature, she's started reading Vinegar Boy. Jessie loves this book. Violet hasn't really gotten into it quite yet. For CW, we completed analysis and imitation of "The Princess and the Pea" although we skipped the final draft in favor of some time outside.

Benny has been working on adding -ing and -ed to the ends of words in Phonics Pathways. I've decided to drop the Bob books temporarily until we get a little farther along because the B series has a lot more words that he doesn't know how to sound out yet.

HISTORY

In the New Testament times, we covered another week in the ministry of Jesus. Violet still has a few summaries to write for me since she refused to do summaries for Jessie to type while I was working in the garden, so there were no notebooking pages for this portion of history. In ancient Rome, we covered the Gracchi, Marius and Sulla. Jessie also read about Pompey and Spartacus. Jessie completed three summaries. For the Gracchi, I asked her to explain the differences between the rich and the poor in Rome and tell how each brother tried to help the poor. For Marius and Sulla, she was supposed to do a comparison of the two men but ended up giving me a straight narration of the story which vanished from the pc somehow. (I'm guessing Henry closed the document before it was saved, and I was unable to recover it.) She did a summary of Spartacus and an outline of . Violet wrote summaries for the Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla. Both girls drew a gladiator and a lion using the Draw and Write Through History book, although I suspect traced would be more accurate that drew based on the final products.

LATIN / LOGIC

Jessie completed lesson 31 in LfC B and has finished the last of her logic assignments for the year. Violet also completed the last of her logic assignments.

OTHER

Henry has been very snugly this week when he wasn't chasing the mop around in circles. He found the dog napping on the kitchen floor one day and tried to wake him up by saying his name. Each time he didn't get a response, he'd move a little closer. In the end, he was laying on his belly on the floor with his face just inches from the dog's. The dog is very good at playing possum. He also thoroughly enjoyed my all chocolate birthday cake as you can see from the picture below.