Week 7, part 1: The olders school

It has been a great and very busy week. We still have one science project and our art lessons to do tomorrow, but we accomplished our other work. Here's our week.

MATH
Jessie has continued to work through the IP section on ratios this week. There are a huge number of problems in the word problems section. Generally, she has done very well. Most of the time if the problem is incorrect, it is because she didn't draw a diagram. We worked together to draw the correct diagram and then she finished solving the problems on her own. I think she'll be glad to move on to a new section next week and get a break from all the word problems. She's also has a harder time this week with her CWP book. This isn't uncommon for the challenging problems, so we just took time to work through the problems together when necessary.

Violet completed the last section in her IP book on multiplication and division. I decided that despite all of the careless mistakes, she had a good grasp of how to multiply by a two digit number. She finished her addition math drill worksheets and is working on multiplication facts now, which I think will help also. Her new section is on fractions. So far she has added and subtracted fractions with and without common denominators as well as simplified her answers when necessary.

Benny finished up the IP section on ordinal numbers this week and began a new section in the textbook and workbook covering numbers up to 20. There was a little bit of counting and matching numbers to words, but overall the emphasis has been on understanding that the 1 or 2 in the tens place represents a group of ten. We also had some basic addition like 10 + 5 = 15.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie
completed another lesson in SWO H. For grammar, she's covering nouns. She struggled a little with differentiating some of the plural nouns. I confess I couldn't really explain very well why tweezers or trousers are considered plural while measles is not. In CW Homer, we're made our third attempt at writing the story in reverse order using "The People Ask Samuel for a King". She also wrote her book report of The Sword and the Stone. This time I let her complete the story chart on her own. I disagreed with her choice of the climax, but her reasoning made sense so I didn't push it. For literature, she's speeding through The Fellowship of the Ring. This week, she finished the first half of the book. I know that our literary analysis next week won't do justice to the book, but I decided for the first time through I cared more about her enjoying the story. We can always do some more in depth analysis in high school.

Violet completed her first review lesson in SWO F. In grammar, she complete unit 2 and did very well on her test. Her fable for CW was "The Fox and the Eagle". We started working on adjectives for the grammar portions so I picked a couple of nouns in her rough draft and had her add in an adjective to describe them. In literature, she completed reading Augustine Came to Kent and began Son of Charlemagne by Willard

Benny continues to progress through Phonics Pathways at a rate of one page per day. We covered words with long o and i sounds that do not end with e and did some general review of what we've learned so far about long vowel sounds. For copywork this week, he finished copying the poem "The Caterpillar" by Rosetti. So far he has memorized the first stanza of the poem. For Bible, we're continuing through Egermeier's Bible Storybook. This week we covered the plagues, the exodus, and the crossing of the Red Sea. For literature, we're still progressing through Little Pilgrim's Progress and The Happy Hollisters.

LATIN/GREEK

Both girls completed lesson 6 in their LfC programs. For Jessie it was a week of review, while Violet began learning about 2nd declension masculine nouns. Jessie also started Elementary Greek this week and easily completed the first chapter which introduces the Greek alphabet.

HISTORY

This week in history we covered Muhammad and the spread of Islam.

Jessie outlined the corresponding sections in The Story of the Middle Ages, read more about Muhammad from FMMA, and finished up learning more about Islam using Islam by Morris. She completed a map showing the Islamic empire.

She also wrote one large essay summarizing the life of Muhammad and what she learned about the religion of Islam and how it differs from Christianity. The latter ended up being mostly from discussions with Mom since I couldn't find a resource that compared the beliefs of the two religions, so it is limited by my own knowledge since I am by no means an expert on the subject.

Violet, Benny, and I covered chapters 6 and 7 in SOTW 2 this week. Violet also read about Muhammad in FMMA. Because of the way the story of Muhammad was told (it comes across rather like a Bible story in one of the our storybooks), I felt the need to add a bit more commentary than usual to discuss my thoughts on the events and the religion of Islam, to compare the teachings of Jesus to the teachings of Muhammad, and to explain in simplified terms the Christian viewpoint on Islam.

They completed maps showing the route of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and the Islamic empire at its peak.

Each completed three summaries covering Muhammad, the Koran, and the spread of the Islamic empire.

Here I have them crushing graham crackers in Ziploc bags to use as sand. There was a lot of pounding and giggling going on.

It may be possible that they had a bit too much fun, but at least neither bag broke open.

We decided to put our oasis on top of a cake. They both helped measure ingredients. Violet did portions of the yellow frosting, and Benny added the blue frosting. Both helped put on graham cracker sand, plastic trees, and animal cracker camels. (If you look closely at the left side, you'll see that part of the cake has cracked due to chunks removed by a hungry toddler who believed the cake was quite tasty enough before the frosting was added.) Everyone enjoyed the results.

We read The Tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves by Kimmel and made "Open Sesame Biscuits".

We also read Sindbad by Zeman and made snakes out of paper plates for the hanging valley of snakes. Violet made hers extra long and skinny

Benny's looked a bit more well fed. Actually, Henry made a snake also with some help from Mom but refused to let me take a picture.

SCIENCE

This week in science, Jessie covered chapter 5 on nutrition. She wrote summaries about the carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and then outlined the remaining information on different vitamins. In the picture below, she used iodine to test for the presence of carbohydrates in a few different foods of her own selection. She was suppose to complete a lab testing for vitamin C today, but I couldn't find the cornstarch to make the indicator so we'll do it tomorrow afternoon instead.

In astronomy this week, we started learning about the planets and covered Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Benny completed little matchbook style booklet for each planet. For each I asked him to name three things that he remember, and I wrote them down. The girls answered the normal chapter questions. They also started filling in a chart a made comparing different features of the planets.

For hands-on, I chose to only complete 2 of the 4 suggested activities.

We demonstrated the importance of an atmosphere in regulating temperature to explain the wide temperature swings on Mercury from extremely hot

to extremely cold.

We also tried to recreate the greenhouse effect on Venus by comparing the ice melting in a regular bowl versus one covered in plastic wrap. I thought the dry ice demonstrations in the Mars chapter looked really cool, but ended up deciding that I wasn't comfortable handling it myself while trying to keep an eye on all the kids to make sure no one else tried to touch it.

For more of Henry's antics for the week with lots of pictures included see the post below.