Week 5:

It's been a long week for us with DH working late on Tuesday and Thursday, but it's been a good week. We've accomplished all of our school work except for geography, which I think I'll change up a bit for next week anyway. Here's our week.

MATH

Jessie has been working all week with ratios and proportions mostly in the form of word problems. It's been a really easy week for her since a lot of the workbook exercises were very short, and she's enjoyed finishing early and having extra time early in the morning.

Violet, on the other hand, has had a rough week in math. We were working on double digit multiplication with a little bit of estimating thrown in, and she had completely forgotten how to do the multiplication part. So I had to go back and reteach double digit multiplication, which means we only actually accomplished three lessons this week. She was doing the working on a dry erase board and just writing down the answers, but I finally said that she had to show her work because she was making too many careless errors.

Benny finished up the textbook and workbook section on subtraction and began the corresponding section in the IP book. The picture on the left is actually one of the few pages that I had him write this week. Most of the work he has been doing mentally so I just let him give me the answers orally. In Miquon, we began a new section which has a combination of addition and subtraction problems on the page. He's doing an excellent job with these as well.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie continues to breeze through the lessons in SWO H, completing lesson 23 this week. In R&S 6, she's been working on paragraphs. Her new literature selection is The Sword in the Stone by White. We've also started a new section in CW Homer. The writing assignment this week was to take the model, which was the text of Genesis 1, and write the story backwards. Jessie declared it to be much worse than even starting in the middle, but I think she managed a decent first attempt anyway.

Violet has worked on diagramming statements and questions this week in R&S 4. She completed her spelling and finished reading her second literature book, Heidi. For dictation, we've switched to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and worked on the introduction scene and the one in which they first find the wardrobe. She is doing much better with dictation now. There are fewer spelling mistakes, although she does still leave out or change words here and there. For CW Aesop, she rewrote the fable "The Boy Bathing" and did very well with the dialogue.

Benny has continued to work on long vowel sounds (mostly o and u) this week in Phonics Pathways. He has finished the 2nd set of level A Bob books and started into the 6th lesson in his ETC book. For copywork, we're writing the 23rd Psalm since that is his current memory work as well. For literature, we're almost halfway through Little Pilgrim's Progress. We finished up Mystery Ranch and began reading The Happy Hollisters.

LATIN / GREEK

Jessie and Violet both completed the 4th lesson in LfC C and A respectively. Jessie has started working on diphthongs in The Greek Code Cracker.

HISTORY

In history, this week we covered Clovis and the Franks and Justinian and the Byzantine Empire. Jessie wrote a summary of Clovis and outlined the chapter on Justinian in The Story of the Middle Ages. I had her read portions of The Byzantine Empire by Nardo and The Byzantine Empire by Marston. She made a chart of the Byzantine classes and a couple of paragraphs on life in the Byzantine Empire in addition to maps of both kingdoms.

Violet, Benny, and I read mostly from SOTW this week since we covered both chapters 11 and 4. Violet also read the chapters on Clovis and Justinian in FMMA and the first chapter of Monks and Mystics. We mapped the two kingdoms, made paper dolls of Justinian and Theodora, and colored in a picture of the Hagia Sophia. We also did a last minute activity of making some mosaic inspired cupcakes which I wrote about in more detail in the previous post.

SCIENCE

This week in anatomy Jessie finished up lesson 3 on the muscular system by learning about cardiac muscle and smooth muscle. She completed her vocabulary crossword and scored a 92 on her test. On Wednesday, she started lesson 4 on the digestive system, summarize why it is important to brush your teeth and what happens to food after it enters your mouth, completed a maze identifying the different types of teeth, and put together a booklet of a model tooth.

Here she's demonstrating what happens to food in the stomach by putting a piece of bread and some water inside of two ziploc bags and mashing the contents.

She also put together a layered booklet of the stomach and outline the related section in the text.

In astronomy this week, we learned about the different layers of the sun, solar power, the types of eclipses, and the surface of the moon. In addition to the regular questions, I added diagrams of solar and lunar eclipses for the girls to label. Benny made a sun facts petal book. For eclipses we stapled the sun, earth, and moon in the appropriate order for each eclipse. I have a moon shaped booklet started, which we'll finish on Monday. For constellations, we learned Lyra, Corona Borealis, Bootes, and Hercules.

We haven't done Monday's lab of charting the sun's course by tracing shadows throughout the day. I forgot at the beginning of the week, and then it's been too cloudy. Below is our solar power lab. We put ice cubes on white, green, and black paper and watched to see which would melt first. We were supposed to measure the temperature of the two glasses of water but decided to just do them by feel instead. We also used our T&K kit to model the different eclipses.

ART

I found a great website with art projects online while reading another mom's weekly report last week. This week I decided we try the draw a cat project. Violet and Jessie enjoyed it. Benny got a little frustrated because it didn't look exactly like he wanted, so he ended up drawing two. The project calls for using oil pastels, but Violet was the only one who wanted to color her cat. She just used regular colored pencils.