Week 18: A Little Bit of This and That

I finally finished up my Christmas shopping. I have a few gifts left to bake and a little to wrap tomorrow. We did squeeze in some school this week. Here's a brief look at what we accomplished.

MATH
Jessie finished up the IP section on speed this week, so we'll be ready to start fresh after break.

Violet learned about perpendicular and parallel lines.

Benny did a little more measuring in Miquon and finished up all of the addition keys on his own this week.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed lesson 35 in SWO H this week. One review lesson to go. YEAH!! In grammar, she did a couple of days of grammar and a lesson on friendly letters. We made a deal that she didn't have to do any written work for the letter lesson this week. Instead, she can wait until after Christmas and count her thank you letters instead. We finished up the last of level 9 in CW Homer using the model "The Night Before Christmas" for analysis and rewriting an old piece on Circe. She also decided to memorize the poem on her own and finished the whole things. For literature, she read Otto of the Silverhand and wrote her book report on The Red Keep.

Violet finished another spelling lesson and a unit on grammar. For copywork, she finished up copying "The Night Before Christmas". She also completed the section with Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for dictation. For CW, she edited her Robin Hood story, which was quite good. She got the week off from literature.
Benny finished the last pages of Phonics Pathways covering r modified vowels and started working on vowel digraphs covering ai and ay this week. Throwing in a little Christmas themed copywork and his normal 2 pages per day in ETC 2, leaves just one more accomplishment.

He was most proud this week that he finished reading The Cat in the Hat.

LATIN/GREEK

We just did some vocabulary and chant review.

HISTORY

Since history was one of the last subjects we started this year, I wanted to get one more week under our belts before Christmas break.

Jessie read about Marco Polo in FMMA and outline the chapter. Then she read chapters from The Story of the Middle Ages covering Edward I, Edward II, and Robert the Bruce.

Violet and Benny completed two more chapters in SOTW covering the Mongols and Marco Polo.

We did summaries for all 4 sections of the reading as well as the associated map work.

We also spent two days with hands on.

First up, Violet and Benny made Chinese paper lanterns (although both were disappointed when I told them we were not putting candles in the middle.

Thursday, we made Chinese farmer hats. They really need some card stock or poster board for support because they keep sliding off.

ART The older kids spent part of their afternoon free time this week doing some watercolor painting.

It's been so long since they did any painting that I had no idea they still had anything left to paint.

Benny might have gotten a little carried away.

HENRY'S CORNER

We finally brought up the presents to put under the tree this week, so Henry spent a lot of time looking at the presents, asking which ones were his, and telling me he wanted to open them.

Tuesday we kept him entertained for a while with a ball of string while Violet and Benny were making their paper lanterns. He spent probably 15 minutes of so cutting off pieces of various length. Once he decided that he had enough pieces, he started wrapping them around his fingers...

or making silly faces for the camera.

He also spent a good bit of time this week playing his"drum" set that Jessie created for him. The older kids all took turns in the fun a few times as well. Needless to say, between that and the Little People Nativity set that plays "Away in a Manger", it has not been very quiet around here for several days.