Week 11: A Good Week

It's been another crazy week. I'm getting closer, but I haven't quite finished packing up all of the summer clothes. There are still a few elusive items hiding down in my laundry piles waiting to be washed. Also DH knocked a large block of wood into his right ankle on Tuesday. I'm glad to say that it didn't break his ankle. It did swell to about twice the normal size, so he's supposed to be sitting around with it propped up as much as possible (which is not something he enjoys).

MATH

All of Jessie's math this week has been word problems with percentages. It's amazing how many variations the Singapore books have. Some of the problems, she did very well on. Some, we worked on together, and a few required me to sit with a dry erase board and work the problem algebraically a couple of different ways before I could figure out the simplest way to explain it to her with a bar diagram.

Violet finally hit a wall in her fractions unit this week. She had a review page on Tuesday and could not remember at all how to multiply a fraction and a whole number. I tried having her look back at the textbook to refresh her memory, and she sat looking at the pages like they were in hieroglyphics or something. So... we back up a few lessons and spent the rest of the week covering how to multiply fractions and whole numbers a second time. So far, so good.

Benny continued through the IP section on addition and subtraction within 20. For the most part, he did very well. The riddles and word problems which required two or more calculations to find the answer were a struggle, but we broke them down one step at a time and made it through. Miquon made a nice contrast, as he breeze easily through more lessons introducing multiplication.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed lesson 28 in SWO H on her second try this week. In grammar, we covered outlining, transitive verbs, direct objects, indirect objects, and how to diagram the latter. In literature, she completed reading Tolkien's The Two Towers on Thursday. I had actually expected the book to take her another week, so we will still need to discuss it on Monday. For CW this week, we edited another old project from last year looking for cohesion. Truthfully, I'm having trouble finding anything that needs much editing, so we end up doing more analyzing than editing. Still, I think the analysis can carry over into her history work and make improvements to her writing making the time we spend worthwhile.


Violet completed lesson 8 in SWO F. In grammar, she finished the unit on nouns and did very well on her test. Thursday, she began the next unit on verbs. In addition to the regular copywork and dictation, she rewrote "Mercury and the Woodman" for CW. For literature, she began reading Pollyanna.

Benny continues to work on consonant digraphs at the beginning of words in Phonics Pathways. This week we covered words starting with ch- and wh- as well as the sight words who, whose, and what. In Explode the Code, he began book 2 which covers consonant blends at the beginning of words. Since he hasn't covered these yet in Phonics Pathways, he found the pages a little more challenging, but still did well on them. For handwriting, he copied another Bible memory verse from Sunday school.

LATIN / GREEK

Jessie learned her final perfect tense, the future perfect, in Latin this week while Violet completed her second review lesson. In Greek, she practiced translating Greek verbs into English and back into Greek. We also finished learning John 1:1 in Greek and added another 5 Greek words to our vocabulary.

HISTORY

This week was a mixture of several smaller TruthQuest topics all over Europe.

Jessie started off zooming through several weaker French kings and ended by reading about Hugh Capet. Then, she moved on to Germany where she learned about Henry the Fowler using FMMA and Otto the Great, his son, and grandson using The Story of the Middle Ages, and mapped Otto's kingdom.

Wednesday, she was off to Spain to read about the off and on persecution of the Spanish Christians under the Moors, stories about El Cid, and how Spain eventually came to be controlled by the Christians again. Violet, Benny, and I started off the week reading about Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky in SOTW2 and mapping their voyages. We also read Eric the Red by Grant. I had Leif the Lucky by Berry to read in place of Leif the Lucky by D'Aulaires (which was unavailable), but we didn't get around to it. Violet also read about the German king, Henry the Fowler, in FMMA and wrote a summary.

We also learned about the Rus, King Vladimir, and his conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity reading a chapter each from SOTW2 and Monks & Mystics. Violet also read and summarized a chapter from FMMA on El Cid.

For hands-on history this week, we made Viking boats using these directions and the dragon head and tail with shields from the SOTW activity guide. I got the idea from reading another weekly report a few weeks ago.

It is by far the most time consuming craft that we have tried. Violet could do some parts on her own, while Benny needed help with most every step. Even DH had to help on this one by cutting the wooden skewers for the oars and rudders for me. With all four of us working together, we finally finished, and they were thrilled with the result.

SCIENCE

In anatomy, Jessie completed lesson 8 on the heart.
She made a flowchart showing how the blood travels from the left side of the heart all the way through the body and back. We also took a heart diagram from The Body Book (minus the labels which I removed), assembled it, and labeled all the different parts as she read about them.

Then of course, we had to add a heart to Mr. Bones.

This week in astronomy, we ended up only completing one lesson. Usually by the afternoon, Benny was doing something with DH. By the time he was finished and ready for science, I was usually working on something else around the house.

Anyway,we did read about NASA. The girls answered their questions while Benny and I completed his booklet. Then we discussed escape velocity and demonstrated by rolling a BB down a ramp toward a strip of magnet. At one book high (the bottom book just made the ramp level with the plate), the BB stuck to the magnet every time.

At 2 books, the BB sometimes stuck to the magnet and sometimes escaped.

Finally, after the third book, the BB completely escaped the magnet every time. The best part, of course, is that they spent the afternoon repeating the experiment with slight variations like larger magnets, stronger magnets, or different size books for the ramp.

HENRY'S CORNER

With DH home for most of the week, Henry spent most of his time with Dad. They read books, watched television, went outside when DH got tired of sitting still, and played different things. Somehow, I didn't manage to get any pictures.