Week 19: Warming Back Up

It was bit of a disorganized start for the year since I spent most of Christmas break trying to restore order to the house after the influx of presents and didn't get much in the way of school planning done at all. We still managed to start up most of our work. Hopefully next week we'll be back up to full speed.

MATH

Jessie spent the entire week working on review exercises in the 6A textbook. She did a great job and has finished her first 6A book!! The picture on the left is from her CWP work for the week.

Violet completed the IP section on perpendicular and parallel lines mid week and began the last section in the 3A books on area and perimeter. She breezed through the textbook portions quickly, but then made a lot of errors in the workbook. Some of those we worked through together, and others I asked her to explain what she had done. In the end it seemed that most of the mistakes were careless errors, so we'll try to keep chugging along next week.

Benny started the Singapore 1B series this week with an easy unit on comparison. We also added in the first CWP book, which we are doing together orally. In Miquon Orange, we finished learning about area and started learning about telling time, the last section of the book.


LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed her last SWO lesson ever!!!!!!! She'll be moving on to VFCR A next week. In grammar, she is also working on pronouns focusing on pronouns in the objective and possessive cases. In CW Homer, we started the final skill level this week which focuses on clarity and revised her telling of "The Face That Launched 1000 Ships" from last year. For literature, she completed a book report of Otto of the Silver Hand by Pyle, read The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Pyle, and filled in a story chart on the plot. We also did a bit of character discussion using Teaching the Classics. It definitely wasn't the most profound discussion ever, but we worked through some of the Socratic questions at least. Hopefully, I'll be a little better prepared by the next book.

Violet completed lesson 17 in SWO F and began learning about subject and object pronouns in R&S 4. In addition to her regular copywork and dictation, she rewrote "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" for CW. We managed a rough draft and two major rewrites because I kept making her go back to add more dialogue and detail but didn't worry about a final draft this week. Her literature selection for the week was The Door in the Wall by De Angeli.

Benny picked back up with vowel digraphs in Phonics Pathways reviewing the long a sound spelled ai or ay and working on the long i sound spelled ie and y and the long o sound spelled oa, oe, or ow. He continued at 2 pages a day in ETC 2 and began SWO A completing ten pages. For literature, we continued reading The Blue Bay Mystery and started The Apple and the Arrow. His copywork was a new poem for memory work, "Time to Rise" by Stevenson.

LATIN / GREEK


Jessie opted to repeat lesson 15 in LfC C this week. She didn't do very well on her test the week before Christmas and told me she needed some extra practice. She also completed lesson 11 of EG1. Violet completed lesson 16 of LfC A.

HISTORY


Jessie focused on England and France this week reading only from The Story of the Middle Ages.
Monday, she wrote a brief summary about Philip IV of France. On Tuesday, she outlined the chapters on Edward II and Edward III of England. (You may notice this outline is a lot longer than normal because I told her she had to outline the passage as it was written instead of just picking and choosing what to put in her outline.) On Wednesday, she read about the start of the Hundred Years War, which she wrote about on Thursday.



Violet and Benny's main focus this week was the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire. We completed the readings, map work, and coloring page from chapter 24 of The Story of the World 2 on the Ottoman Empire. Violet also read about Edward I of England in Our Island Story and completed a summary.

From Monks & Mystics, we read about the beginning of the universities, Thomas Aquinas, and Catherine of Sienna. The kids completed narrations of the SOTW material.

For hands on this week, we included Jessie in our first project and built cannons out of toilet paper tubes on Tuesday. I had ping pong balls flying around my house all afternoon.

Wednesday, we pulled the rest of the cookie dough from Christmas cutout cookies from the freezer and cut out a few crosses to make edible Byzantine crosses. (We just cut ours out freehand instead of bothering with the template from the SOTW Activity Guide.)

We also skipped painting with egg tempera (I'm not a big fan of food coloring) and just decorated with icing and some leftover Christmas sprinkles.

Our last project of the week was Turkish dancing bears.

SCIENCE

Jessie didn't get very far in her anatomy book this week. I gave her a quick assignment on Monday but didn't finish up the assignments for the week, so she ended up with basically a week off. Hopefully, I can pull together the rest of those lesson plans this weekend.

In earth science, we finished off the last three lessons in the first unit covering the topics of

the Ice Age, glaciers, and icebergs. The Ice Age activity was a crossword. The girls also had a review crossword that I created for the unit to complete at the end of the week.

For hands on, we floated some ice cubes in water to observe how much of the ice was above the water and how much was below. Benny and Violet thought it would be fun to look at the ice through magnifying glasses while we were at it. We also sailed a toy boat through the water, so they could watch it crash into the submerge portion of the ice cube. There was also an activity for a mini glacier, which we discussed but did not complete.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry's favorite part of the week was helping outside. He, Benny, and I took the kids wagon down to the woods on Tuesday when I found the kindling box empty and collected two wagon loads to refill the box and get the wood stove fire restarted. He also got to hang out with DH and ride on the tractor when he brought up more firewood from the stacks in the woods to just outside the basement door. Nothing beats getting to help out Mom and Dad with something "important".