Week 26: Moving Steadily Along

It's been a chilly week here after a beautiful weekend.  The kids were a little stir crazy about being stuck inside again, but we managed somehow.

MATH


Jessie finished up her textbook and workbook section on area and circumference of circles, semicircles, and quarter circles and began the corresponding section in the IP book on Friday.  We have really struggled this week with a lot of careless errors.  Either she was forgetting to divide by 2 or by 4 when she didn't have a complete circle, or she was making a computation error somewhere in the multiplication.  Needless to say math has taken much longer than usual this week.


Violet continues to work on decimals in her 4B text.  This week she learned the thousandths place.  The only part that gave her any trouble was reducing the fraction after converting the decimal to the fraction.  By midweek, I ended up telling both girls that I would not check off any work that didn't show me step by step how they got the answers.  TGIF.


Benny sailed through his math this week as usual making working with him a nice change of pace from correcting the girls.  He's working in his IP section on addition and subtraction within 40.  It took us a while, but he really enjoyed completing this plane by solving the problems and them coloring them according to the answer.  In Miquon, he's doing a combination of addition and subtraction but with smaller numbers. 

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie continues to fly through the material in CW Poetry for Beginners.  One of her assignments for the week was to rewrite the children's song "Do You Know the Muffin Man?".  Her literature selection for the week was Thunderstorm in the Church 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.

Violet successfully completed another week of SWO F and has been working with adverbs in R&S 4.  Friday she got a break from adverbs for a quick lesson on rhyme in poetry.  She completed editing "The Gingerbread Man", but we didn't do a final copy for CW Aesop.  After giving her a quick cursive test last week, I realized that she basically just needed work on some of the capital cursive letters.  For copywork this week, I've been having her do two letters a day from Dr. Seuss's ABC.  We're still using The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for dictation.  She's still working through All Things Bright and Beautiful by Herriot for literature.

Benny read The Bears' Vacation by Berenstain this week for his reader in addition to his regular Phonics Pathways pages.  He completed his regular ETC and copywork, and aced another spelling test in SWO A.  For literature, we completed reading The Lighthouse Mystery by Warner.

LATIN/GREEK

For Latin this week, Jessie and I did a review week.  She drilled through all of the vocabulary from LfC C over 3 days on her own.  Together we reviewed all of the grammar chants from the back of the LfC C primer that we have covered up to this point.  In Greek, she completed lesson 18.  Violet had a regular Latin week and completed lesson 22.

HISTORY

This week in history we covered topics 18 to 20 in TruthQuest Renaissance, Reformation, and Exploration.

 Jessie read mainly from The Story of the Renaissance and Reformation this week.  She outlined the chapters on Cesare Borgia and answered questions from the TruthQuest commentary on Machiavelli.

 She wrote brief paragraphs on Savanarola and Erasmus on Tuesday.  Wednesday she took notes on all of the chapters covering Martin Luther and wrote a longer summary of the information on Thursday.

With the younger crew we focused solely on the Reformation this week reading a portion of chapter 34 on Martin Luther and a portion of chapter 36 on the Reformation.  We also started the third book in the History Lives series, Courage and Conviction by Withrow reading portions of the chapter on the Reformation as well as chapters on Erasmus and Martin Luther.

I was rather disappointed in the suggested activities in the SOTW activity guide this week, so we came up with our own.  After reading about how Erasmus was caught between the Catholic church and Martin Luther with both sides demanding he support them and criticizing him, I thought a game of tug o' war would be appropriate.

One of the things we read in SOTW on Thursday was that Protestants believed that everyone should be able to read the Bible on their own.  I made little puzzle strips with John 1:1 and Genesis 1:1 in Latin on one side and in English on the other. 

The kids had to arrange the Latin side in order like a puzzle.  Then we read the verse in Latin and flipped it over to read the same verse in English.

SCIENCE

Jessie has been learning about different types of chemical bonds this week including ionic, covalent, and metallic.  She also covered alloys and crystals in God's Design for Chemistry.

For the bonding lessons, she created atomic models using colored mini-marshmallows.  That's Li and F on the left, water in the middle and Be on the right.

 For the crystals lesson, she cracked open a geode

 to reveal the crystals inside.

Everyone pitched in to start the flowering rock experiment from our earth science kit that we didn't get to a few weeks ago.  We added food coloring and vinegar in sufficient amounts to cover the two rocks in the bag.  Now we just have to wait for the crystals to form.

In earth science this week we covered mountains and earthquakes.

We used a piece of newspaper to demonstrate how fold mountains are formed,

built several different block structures to see

how well they survived an earthquake (Shaking the table to knock down the buildings was Henry's favorite activity of the week.), and

modeled a seismograph.

We also checked back in with our fossilized sponge experiment from a few weeks back and compared our control sponge with the "fossilized" one now that all the water has finally evaporated.

HENRY'S CORNER

In his more mischievous moments this week, Henry thought my dining room would look nice decorated in plastic wrap; and he delighted in emptying the ashes out of the wood stove (which then I had Benny put back so I could get a fire going).

 In his more adorable moments, he snuggled up between Violet and Pooh and friends for a pretend nap,

 was utterly delighted to discover how to make the colored pencil lead come in and out,

and worked on his fine motor skills by stacking Battleship pieces into a tower.