Week 10: Starting Back Up

It's been a bit of a hectic week. We came back from the beach on Saturday and weren't really home very much of Sunday, so I didn't have the regular checksheets filled out on Monday morning. Add to that the fact that I hadn't even planned out Jessie's history for the week and it made for an interesting start. We managed to fumble through Monday using just my binder. By the end of Tuesday, I had managed to fill in most of the checksheets and unpack most of the bags from our trip. That doesn't even count the mountains of seasonal clothes that I need to deal with over the weekend.

MATH

Jessie picked back up with percentages this week and after a couple of review exercises focused mainly on word problems with percentages. We solved some of the problems with bar diagrams, others by converting the percentages to fractions, and the remainder by converting the percentages to decimals. She also caught me off guard with one or two problems which she solved rather creatively. It's not often that I have to ask her to explain what she was doing in a problem when she actually shows her work. Overall, I thought it was a good variety of problems in just the regular workbook pages for the week.

Violet continues to breeze through fractions this week. She has worked different methods to multiply a fraction and a whole number and then applying that ability to various word problems.


Benny finished the workbook section on adding and subtracting within 20 and has moved on to the corresponding section in the IP book. In his Miquon Orange, we've begun introducing the concept of multiplication and the relationship between multiplication and addition. Benny was also excited to finish up his Visual Perceptual Skill Building: Book 1 this week as well.

LANGUAGE ARTS

In spelling, Jessie hit her first lesson to repeat for the year. Part of the problem was the accent marks on words like fiancee, and part of the problem appears to be that she was pronouncing a few of the words incorrectly. Hopefully, it will sort out easily enough next week. Her grammar (much to her dismay) has corresponded very nicely with her Latin lessons covering the present, past, and future perfect tenses of English verbs. In literature, she was thrilled to be handed Tolkein's The Two Towers as her next selection. I need to look ahead in history over the weekend, so I can set a deadline for finishing the book. In CW, we began skill level 8. Unlike all of the previous writing assignments, the last three levels focus not on rewriting from a model but on editing a selection written by the student. I pulled out Jessie's rewriting of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" from CW last year. The basic focus on the week was on the cohesion of the story. We looked at the characters, discussed how we would expect them to act, how that actually acted, and what caused any differences.

Violet succeeded in getting the week off from literature, since I hadn't even considered a new literature selection for her yet. She did complete another spelling lesson. In grammar, she worked on plural forms of nouns. In CW, I rearranged her models a little so that she was rewriting the story "King Alfred and the Cakes" which corresponded to our history lessons for the week. She also completed the normal daily copywork and dictation.

Benny picked back up in Phonics Pathways and did very well this week. On Friday, he completed the first ETC book. YEAH!! He is almost finished writing the 23rd Psalm for his copywork. For literature, we've been working on Little Pilgrim's Progress and Viking Adventure by Bulla.

LATIN / GREEK

Both Jessie and Violet completed chapter 9 in their respective LfC books. Jessie worked on the pluperfect tense, and Violet focused on neuter nouns. In EG, Jessie completed week 4, which introduces the Greek ending for the present tense and conjugating verbs.

HISTORY

This week in history, we shifted our focus back to England and looked at the Viking invasions of England.

Jessie read a combination of chapters from The Story of the Middle Ages and Famous Men of the Middle Ages. She covered Ragnar the Viking and Egbert the Saxon,

mapped England during the time of Alfred the Great, wrote a two paragraph essay on King Alfred, created a chart of the English kings after Alfred through Edward the Confessor, and outlined a chapter on MacBeth which although slightly off topic fit into the time period of the week.

Violet, Benny, and I worked on the first 2 sections of chapter 15 in SOTW this week. We learned about the Viking invasion of England. Violet read about Egbert the Saxon in FMMA.

We also read about Alfred the Great in SOTW. (Violet read more about in in Our Island Story.) Both completed maps of the location of Wessex and the Salisbury Plain where Alfred defeated the Vikings. As you can tell by the size of the summaries, they both enjoyed the reading. We added a picture of King Alfred from our HTTA timeline figures CDs.

Our first cooking project of the week was making Viking bread. We did have to add a couple extra tablespoons of liquid beyond what the recipe called for to get a good dough consistency. The bread was quite good and tasted rather like a biscuit. One change I will make next time is to divide the dough in half and shape two smaller loaves to make it easier to cut.

We also made a batch of Alfred cakes using the recipe from the activity book as a guide. We didn't bother with adding dates and substituted rice milk for the heavy cream and orange juice. Personally, I would try cutting back on the liquids by 1 or 2 tablespoons because the dough was extremely sticky, and we had to use lots of flour for the kids to be able to shape the cakes. Still, they were tasty.

SCIENCE

Jessie finished up lesson 7 on the circulatory system this week.

She did the normal outlining and summarizing and scored very well on both her vocabulary review and her chapter test.

I didn't really care for the activities in the Apologia book, so this activity came from The Human Body by Van Cleave to demonstrate the process of clotting by using a stretched cotton ball over a hole in the paper.

In astronomy this week, I opted to complete only a half week of lessons to free up time in the afternoons for myself to do some more planning and start tackling the mess in the kids rooms from the seasonal clothing shift.

We read about the plutoids Pluto and Eris, and Benny completed a matchbook on Pluto. The girls and I completed a worksheet that designed to calculate a person's weight on different planets. We also used the table of planet facts and calculated the girl's ages on the different planets based on the amount of time each takes to revolve around the sun. As we got farther out, it became more of an estimate as I tried to calculate fractions of a year, but there were lots of giggles so it was worth the effort.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry's been his normal mischievous self this week. He managed to grab one of Jessie's dry erase markers when no one was looking and scribble all over my dining room wall. (Thank goodness we had some magic erasers to clean it up.)

This is Henry's first attempt at our shape sorter.

Friday was colder than the rest of the week, so he decided to run around in his blanket for a while.

He and Benny made a sticker picture, but for some reason he didn't want to sit still so I could take a picture of his finished work.