Week 15: A Lighter Week

It's been a slower week for us. I opted not to restart everything this week for several reasons. Benny accidentally bumping my flash drive and breaking it meant I lost any file that I've created since January (my last backup) that I don't have a hard copy of. Happily, there were no pictures on the drive. Sadly, that meant my science plans for the "Our Planet Earth" book are no more because they had yet to be printed. But the desire to avoid facing the problems with my pc files meant I did catch up on a lot of housework at the beginning of the week. Jessie had a light enough load that I could let run some errands with DH one morning. We've used our afternoons to begin decorating for Christmas for the rest of the week.

MATH

Jessie continued to work steadily through the IP section on percentages this week. She's definitely doing much better this time through, so I'm confident that she has a better grasp on the concepts now. She also started back up with the percentage section of her CWP book.

Violet finished up her review assignments and began a new unit on graphs this week. She also finished up the last word problems in her CWP 3 book. WooHOOOO! (Although she's not excited about started the CWP 4 book next week.)

Benny finished up the IP unit on length and began the textbook and workbook unit on weight in his 1A books. He officially finished the last page of his 1A textbook Friday. YEAH!!! That leaves the IP unit on weight and a bit of review and then it will be time to break out the 1B set of books. In Miquon Orange, he finished working with fractions and started working on comparing numbers and learning the greater than and less than signs.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Jessie continued to work with verbs in R&S 6. She also had an assignment on note-taking and creating an outline from her notes this week. She did an excellent job on her spelling test and is excited to see herself closing in on the end of her final spelling book. For CW, we began work on level 9 this week, which focuses on concision. I printed out her rewrite of "The Trojan Horse" from last year, which had been a bit sparsely written. We compared the differences between the person and action elements of her story versus the original model, considered which details were essential and which were not, and revised her model. For literature this week, she read A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by Konigsburg. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to read it this weekend so we can discuss it on Monday.

Violet finished Unit 4 in R&S 4 and moved on to #5 on Thursday. After diagramming only sentence skeletons so far this year, she finally learned what a direct object is and how to diagram it. She also successfully completed another spelling lesson as well as the normal dictation and copywork assignments. In the spirit of the Christmas season, I let her choose a Christmas carol from her copywork, and she choose "The First Noel". For literature, she read If All the Swords in England by Willard. Her CW assignment was rewriting the story of William Tell. I moved her on to the 3rd level of writing assignment, and we focused on looking at the descriptive portions of the model and trying to add a bit more description to her retelling.

Benny continues to move steadily along in Phonics Pathways and ETC 2 at a pace of 1 page and 2 pages per day respectively. This week he also read Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. For copywork, he is writing the first verse of "Away in a Manger". I gave him the week off from literature because he's been outside with DH a lot. I figured we'd have plenty of time to read next week when DH is at the beach fishing with a friend.

LATIN/GREEK

Both girls completed lesson 13 in their respective LfC programs. Jessie was focused on the differences between the four verb conjugations, while Violet completed a review lesson. In EG, we learned 5 more masculine nouns, the endings for masculine nouns, and practiced some declining.

HISTORY

This week in history, we actually had two different topics going at the same time. Jessie was focused on England, and Violet and Benny where focused mainly on Palestine.

Jessie covered Henry II (including a map of his lands), his wife Eleanor, the troubles between Henry and Thomas Becket, and the troubles Henry had with his wife and sons. Then she moved ahead to focus on Richard the Lionhearted for her essay this week.

Violet and Benny finished learning about the Crusades and colored the SOTW crusade coloring page. We also learned about Saladin from SOTW and Saladin: Noble Prince of Islam by Stanley.

Then we jumped back in time and read about El Cid, the Christian reconquest of Spain, the scattering of the Jews, and the treatment of the Jews throughout Europe during the Middle Ages by both the Christians and the Muslims.

Our only hands on project this week was creating pilgrim badges.

No SCIENCE

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry spent most of the week keeping tabs on DH and trying to help whenever he could.

He also spent a lot of time in the basement learning to ride Benny's old bike after DH put the training wheels back on. He did a great job and is very proud of himself.