Week 17: Chugging along at half speed

Whew!! I thought this report would never get done! I've never before had so many problems with Blogger. While the actual writing of the report was extremely frustrating, the week was great. We didn't do much in the way of science because I needed to afternoons finish up some Christmas stuff at the beginning of the week (I'm not usually this late mailing Christmas cards). Then I scrapped my plans to double up at the end of the week and instead sent the kids out to enjoy the snow while it lasts. Here's our week....

MATH

Jessie was thrilled to be finished with the IP section on percentages and to start a new much easier section on speed in the textbook and workbook. She was even happier on Friday when she finished her last CWP problem on percentages.

Violet spent the week working on the IP section on angles. She is getting much better at using the protractor to measure and draw angles. She also did some more calculating of angles either along a straight line or in the corner of a rectangle where the angle is divided into 2 or 3 parts. Somehow I missed getting a picture of her math this week.

Benny finished up the last pages in his 1A IP book this week. He's DONE with the 1A level!!! YEAH!!! We're very close to finishing up the Miquon Orange book as well, so we'll probably double up some lessons next week to get it done before break. That's easy enough to do since the measurement pages are really short. Since we had some extra time Friday during math, I pulled out the addition wrap-up keys; and we worked together on the +1 key so he could start getting an idea of how they work.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed unit 5 in R&S 6 as well as lesson 34 in SWO H. She's very excited about being close to finishing her last spelling book. For literature, she completed a book report on last week's selection, The Lost Baron by French and read The Red Keep by French. For CW, we're counting down the weeks until completion already. We're only have 5 to go before we move on to the poetry books. This week, I selected her last version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" for the writing portion.

Violet completed reading The Hidden Treasure of Glaston for literature this week. For her copywork, she requested "The Night Before Christmas". Keeping with the Christmas theme, we jumped ahead to the section of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where they meet Father Christmas and receive their gifts. In CW, she began analyzing and rewriting a model called "The Story of Robin Hood". This is the first of several longer models that we'll be doing for most of the remainder of the year that we'll spread out over two weeks. For analysis, we continue to focus on description by reviewing adjectives and beginning to look for adverbs. She also doubled up and zipped through several lessons in R&S 4 this week.

Benny finished up with double consonant beginnings and moved on to the r controlled vowel sounds in Phonics Pathways. In ETC 2, he started lesson 8 which has double consonant endings. We also began reading The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, but since the pages have a lot more words per page, we're spreading the book over two weeks this time. For copywork, he copied his Sunday school Bible verse and then started working on the first verse of "Joy to the World". We haven't done a lot of read-alouds this week, but did manage to start The Blue Bay Mystery by Warner and The Minstrel in the Tower by Skurzynski.

LATIN/GREEK

Jessie and Violet both completed lesson 15 in their respective LfC programs. Jessie completed lesson 10 in EG1 which introduced some basic translation work.

HISTORY

This week in history, I had Jessie covering several smaller topics, which gave her a break from the normal Thursday essay.
She wrote summaries about King Rudolf of Germany and Henry III of England and outlined the chapters of The Story of the Middle Ages covering Saint Francis and the events in Germany and Switzerland after the death of King Rudolf including the story of William Tell. She also read Cathedral by Macaulay and Medieval Cathedral: The Inside Story by MacDonald, but I thought she had done enough writing so I didn't assign any for the books.

With the younger 2 this week, there wasn't really a good line up of topics. Since they are going to learn about the Mongols and Marco Polo next week, I decided this would be a good week to go back and cover the chapters on China and Japan in SOTW 2. We learned about Yang Chien uniting China, the building of the Grand Canal, and the Tang Dynasty. Benny found it a little on the boring side, but the mention of gunpowder being invented did catch his attention.

Then we read about the Yamato clan uniting Japan and how Japan was influenced by China and Korea.

Our first hands on project of the week was string block printing. They drew their designs and traced them with glue, and I added the yarn.

They could hardly wait for the blocks to dry so they could try them out.

I poured the paint and told them to use them like stamps. Then they were off.

The kids both tried to fit as many stamps on the page as possible.

Our second activity of the week was playing Kai-awase. We didn't bother making our own sets of shells. I simply explained to the kids how the Japanese used shells to play a game similar to Memory, and then we got out our Memory cards and played a couple of rounds.

I won the first game, and Benny won the second. Violet was up for a third, but Benny wanted to get outside in the snow before lunch.

SCIENCE

Not a lot of science went on this week. Jessie did finish lesson 11 and complete her vocabulary crossword. We took the week off from our earth science book so I could use the time to wrap and ship out Christmas presents and send off Christmas cards.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry has been his usual curious, energetic self. Here's just one example of his ingenuity for the week. Normally, we keep his extra pacifiers on top of the television cabinet. Since my Christmas village is up there, I moved them down to the top shelf instead. Henry figured out how to knock his spare pacifiers down using his fishing rod. We call it "baba fishing". Now I just have to figure out where they all went. I know we have about a half dozen somewhere around here.