It has been a beautiful week with some very welcome spring like temperatures. We did drop one science lesson in favor of getting outside for the afternoon, but otherwise we completed out scheduled work.
MATH
Jessie started a new unit in Singapore 6B this week on circles. She learned the terms diameter, radius, and circumference, and how to calculate the circumference and the area of a circle using the value of pi. She also took that knowledge and applied it to calculating the perimeter and area of semicircles, quarter circles, and other figures which were a combination of squares, rectangles, and some portion of a circle.
Violet continued working with decimals. She learned the hundredth place this week, practiced converting back and forth between decimals and fractions, compared decimal numbers, determined the value of different digits in a number, and added up the parts to make the complete number.
Benny finished up subtracting numbers within 40, spent a couple of days working on addition of three numbers, and moved on to the corresponding section of his IP book in Singapore. In his Miquon book, he completed the last pages in the subtraction section. His favorite pages were the game pages. One had a frog and a grasshopper and the other a truck and a car each with their own number line. We took turns rolling the die and moving along the number to see who reached the end first.
LANGUAGE ARTS
Jessie completed almost all of the remainder of the chapter on capitalization and punctuation. That leaves just the chapter review and the test for next week before she is on to a new topic. She completed another vocabulary unit, but she really is not liking VFCR at all. I'm going to sit down over the weekend and decide if we can make some changes to improve the program or if we need to look for something new. We completed another week of CW Poetry, learned how to do a basic outline of a poem, continued working with rhythm and meter in couplets, and discussed quatrains this week. For literature, I gave her
The Lark and the Laurel
by Willard. She started off with a skeptical look. Then I pointed out that she had enjoyed other historical books by the same author, which helped pique her interest. On Tuesday, when I asked her where she was in the book and how it was going, she informed me that she had already read the entire book five times. I guess it must be pretty good. I'm hoping to read it tomorrow, so we can do some analysis on Monday.
Violet successfully completed lesson 22 in SWO and has been working on adverbs in R&S 4. She had one grammar writing assignment this week on giving directions. In CW Aesop, we discussed "The Gingerbread Man" and looked for adjectives and adverbs in the model. She completed the first half of the writing assignment by outlining and completing a rough draft. For literature, I started her on
All Things Bright and Beautiful
by Herriot. She's taking it at a slow one chapter a day pace.
Benny worked on the oi and oy as well as ou and ow this week in
Phonics Pathways
. We also read
The Berenstain Detectives: The Case of the Missing Pumpkin 
slowly over the course of four days. For copywork, he finished the second stanza of the poem "Work" which he has also been memorizing. Literature is naturally the next Boxcar children book,
The Lighthouse Mystery
by Warner.
HISTORY
For history this week, we covered only two TruthQuest topics with our main focus on Christopher Columbus and other early explorers.
Jessie covered 3 chapters in Miller's
The Story of the Renaissance and Reformation catching up on the events in the Holy Roman Empire and France including the reigns of Maximilian of Austria and Charles VIII and Louis XII of France.
As you might notice these outlines are much longer than her more recent ones. I made her switch back to outlining paragraph by paragraph. (Hence the reason I was very unpopular at the beginning of the week.) For explorers, she read mostly from the Guerber book and wrote a paragraph on Columbus while outlining for Amerigo Vespucci and John Cabot.
For Vasco da Gama, I found a picture book called
A Long and Uncertain Journey 
by Goodman for her to read and summarize.
Violet, Benny, and I spent the entire week on explorers. We used SOTW for learning about Columbus and
Cabot. We briefly touched on Vespucci and Balboa using selected pages from
Discovery of the Americas 
by Maestro.
I read them the same book on da Gama as Jessie read. It was a bit long for Benny's taste, but I thought it was well written. It was the also the only age appropriate book I could find on the topic.
On Tuesday, our craft for Cabot was to create a Popsicle stick fish puzzle.
Both Violet and Benny had fun mixing up the sticks and then trying to reassemble their puzzles.
On Monday and Wednesday, we worked on a
Spanish Galleon using directions I found on the internet. Violet and Benny were much more excited about this craft and immediately disappeared to play with them. (Henry learned how to make a playdough ball, which he though should be in the picture as well.)
SCIENCE
Jessie completed unit 2 of God's Design Atoms and Molecules. Monday she covered hydrogen, how it reacts, hydrogenation, and hydrogen fuel cells.
Tuesday she covered carbon and held a plate over a lighted candle to collect a small sample of carbon to study. She also learned about allotropes and the three different forms of carbon as well as how carbon is used in nanotechnology.
Wednesday, it was on to oxygen and extinguishing a flame by cutting off its oxygen supply. She did very well on both her vocabulary crossword review and her unit test.
Monday and Tuesday, Jessie and Violet finished up unit 2 of God's Design Planet Earth with a vocabulary crossword and quiz. Wednesday, we moved on to unit 3 on mountains and movement.
We discussed the theory that once there was only one continent called Rodinia. Then we cut up a map of the world
and taped the continents together to make our own.
HENRY'S CORNER
Henry's favorite discovery of the week was that construction paper sticks to the television set without any glue or tape needed.
He also wanted to look like he's doing school with the big kids, so he's diligently marking up Violet's check sheet although neither of us could decipher the new assignments.
by Susan Cooper is the second book in "The Dark is Rising Sequence" of fantasy books. On his 11th birthday, Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, discovers that he is the last of the Old Ones who protect the world from the dark forces of evil. It is his task to find the six magical Signs that must be merged to help the Old Ones in the coming final battle between Dark and Light. But time is short for the season of darkness has started with the midwinter, and the dark forces are strengthening daily using all of their power to keep him from completing his task.
by Vernon. In grammar, she took the test for the unit on capitalization and punctuation and has moved on to adjectives. We tried having a week of vocabulary review, but Jessie is apparently retaining very little of her VFCR A work. I'm trying to decide if there's improve her retention and continue with the program or if it would be better to switch to a different program.
. We're still using 
for dictation. She's still working through 
