Week 21: Another Good Week

MATH

 Jessie spent the first three days of the week finishing up the last section of the mid-year review in her IP book.She is now officially finished with all of the 6A books.  YEAH!!  Thursday she began the first unit in the 6B textbook and workbook on fractions and learned how to divide whole numbers by fractions and how to divide fractions by whole numbers.

Violet and I started back at the beginning of the unit on area and perimeter, and it seems to be going much better this time around.  The number of mistakes is much lower and consists mostly of computation errors.  She continues to zip along through her CWP book with a couple of easy sections like the perpendicular and parallel lines pictured on the right.

Benny continued with picture graphs this week mostly in the IP.  He also continues to do very well with the CWP 1 book, which we are doing orally.  In Miquon Red, he continued to work on even and odd numbers.  We looked at patterns in addition (odd + even = odd, odd + odd = even, and even + even = odd).  We also practiced pairing objects to determine if a set of objects contained an even or odd number of items.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie completed her 3rd week of CW Homer at the level 10 skill level.  Only one more week to go!  In VFCR A, we worked on lesson 2, and she did very well on the review exercise for the first two lessons.  In literature, she completed reading The Return of the King by Tolkien.  In grammar, she continues to work with pronouns covering demonstrative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and relative pronouns this week.  I think I may have learned as much grammar as she did this week.

Violet continued reading The Beggar's Bible by Vernon for literature.  For CW Aesop, she began rewriting "The Three Little Pigs".  Instead of a keywork outline, we tried a one level outline with the model again this week.  I divided the story into sections and she had to write one sentence per section.  It went much better this week.  Copywork and dictation continue as always.  In grammar, she got a brief break from pronouns to complete a couple of lessons on letter writing.  I had her write thank you letters to my parents and my sister's family for her Christmas presents since she had forgotten to do it earlier instead of completing the exercises in the textbook.  She was quite happy at the prospect of getting out her new stationary for the first time.

Benny and I decided that we would spend some time reviewing all of the new vowel sounds and vowel digraphs for a week or two in Phonics Pathways before moving on to new material.  This week we review the ar, or, and er sounds with their different spellings.  He's been giving me a little push back in the increase in ETC from 2 pages to 3 pages per day, but he is doing very well with the work.  In spelling, he finished lessons 7 and 8 this week and has done well on his spelling tests.  His copywork was a Bible verse and then we started writing the letters of the alphabet.  For literature we began The Woodshed Mystery by Warner and The Canterbury Tales by Cohen.

LATIN & GREEK

Jessie completed lesson 17 in LfC C and lesson 13 in EG1.  Violet struggled with her review crossword in lesson 18 because it was english to latin.  I've decided to take next week to work just on vocab until she's comfortable translating in both directions.  She also started her history reader this week.  We worked through the first lesson together on a dry erase board, and she did a great job.

HISTORY

This week in the Middle Ages, everyone learned about the end of the Hundred Years War.  This also marks the completion of our Truthquest:  Middle Ages guide.  Considering that we didn't start history our first week at school, I'm very excited at our progress in history this year (and also a little intimidated because my planning for the next guide is only in the beginning stages).

Jessie as always read about Henry V and Joan of Arc in The Story of the Middle Ages.  She used this information for her summary of Henry V.  Wednesday she read the Landmark book Joan of Arc by Ross for her summary on Thursday.

Violet and Benny completed chapter 26 in SOTW 2 and did narrations of Henry V and Joan of Arc as well.  We also finished up out Monks & Mystics book learning about John Hus and a brief summary of several other church figures of the time.  Violet read Joan of Arc by Stanley, and Benny and I read Joan of Arc by Poole as supplementary reading.

Along with the reading, the kids completed both the mapwork and the coloring page from the chapter and assembled their notebook pages.

 Beyond the mapwork and coloring page, we did the Bowl for the Crown game from the SOTW activity guide.

 I opted to skip the step where you make little crowns to tape on the cans and just told the kids to imagine the crowns were there.

As usual any activity involving a tennis ball also involves some dog obedience training (because he believes all the tennis balls are his).  Still he followed me back upstairs and stayed there when I told him to stay.

SCIENCE

Jessie completed chapter 13 in her anatomy next.  I think we'll both be glad to finish next week because there really aren't as many good hands on activities in the later chapters.

In earth science this week we started learning about rocks.

After a bit of reading we pull out our set of 15 rocks.  The first challenge was to guess which row of rocks corresponded to each of the three types:  igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.  Benny managed to guess all three correctly.  Then we took a Rocks & Minerals guide from the library and identified each of the five igneous and sedimentary rocks.  (I'm not thrilled with the guide.  If you know of a better one please leave a comment with the title.)

For igneous rocks, we also melted some wax and added it to a bowl of cold water and a bowl of ice (crushed would have worked better) to illustrate the differences in extrusive and intrusive rock formations.   

For sedimentary rocks, I chose to skip the activity of making our own sandstone (because I didn't have anywhere to keep the completed projects that they wouldn't have ended up broken within a week) and instead we illustrated by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (with buns because we're out of bread).  The idea being the peanut butter and jelly cemented together the two layers of bread like minerals cement together the sedimentary rocks.

ART

There was no official art this week.  Jessie has a painting in progress that I'll post when it's completed.

Benny worked hard on the sticker mosaic pictures he received for Christmas.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry was a handful this week.  On the down side, he deleted Jessie's Joan of Arc summary from the computer so that she had to rewrite it and managed to coat himself, the carpet around the sink, and the bathroom floor with baby powder.  I think I'm going to have to go back and shampoo that portion of the rug thi weekend.

On the up side, he has spent a lot of time this week listening to Veggietales CDs.  He wanders around the house singing the chorus of "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" (unless of course I have the video camera handy).