Week 28: A Sick Week

It's been a bit of a rough week here as we all took turns being sick for a day or two.  We took off most of Wednesday morning to go shopping with my mil who wanted to buy each of the kids a couple of outfits for their birthday.  Other than our earth science, we got most everything else I had planned accomplished.

MATH
Jessie cruised through her IP section on pie charts this week and spent the final three days completing a 6 page comprehensive review in the textbook.

Violet also finished up the decimal section of her IP book this week.  Then she moved on to a review exercise in the textbook and another in the workbook.  I wish I could say she sailed through both, but we had a battle over attitude for the first one which thankfully is over.

Benny finished his first unit on multiplication in the Singapore textbook and workbook and moved into the corresponding IP section.  He continues to do exceptionally well with the CWP 1 book and zooms through his Miquon pages on addition and subtraction.

LANGUAGE ARTS


Jessie's working with prepositional phrases in R&S.  She also had a lesson on simile and metaphor which she decided to write the poem on the right for her assignment rather than writing a descriptive paragraph.  We started Caesar's English 1 for vocabulary and breezed through the first lesson.  In poetry we continued working with outlining, metaphors, determining meter, and learned about ballads this week.  I posted her Aesop based ballad in a separate post below this one.  No literature again this week, but I do have something lined up for next week at least.

Violet finally finished copying from Dr. Seuss's ABC for cursive copywork with a minor meltdown over writing Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz.  For grammar she has moved on to a unit on capitalization and punctuation.  She scored a perfect 100 on her test for SWO F and is steadily working through All Things Bright and Beautiful by Herriot for literature.

Benny finished up his 3rd Explode the Code workbook, continues to do very well with his pages in Phonics Pathways, and read several very short early reader books this week including:  Old Hat, New Hat by Berenstain; "Buzz" said the Bee by Lewison; Hop, Waddle,  Swim by Berenstain; Faster, Slower, Higher, Lower by Berenstain; and Nose, Toes, Antlers, Tail by Berenstain.  For copywork he's going through Dr. Seuss's ABCs, so I can evaluate whether or not he is forming all of the letters correctly.

LATIN/GREEK

Jessie completed lesson 23 in LfC C and lesson 20 in EG1, while Violet finished lesson 24 in LfC A.

HISTORY

This week in history we started our first of two weeks on the Spanish conquistadors.

Jessie read  Aztec Times by Mason and Cortes: Conqueror of Mexico by Jacobs, completed paragraph summaries of the material, and mapped the Aztec empire and the route of Cortes.

She also read Magellan: Voyager With a Dream by Jacobs, wrote a summary paragraph, and mapped the voyage of his ship.

Violet and Benny learned about the African slave trade and the Middle Passage as well as the story of Cortes and Montezuma using SOTW and completed the chapter map work.

We were going to read Magellan: First Around the World by Syme, but ran out of time and ended up just reading the portion of a chapter covering Magellan in SOTW.

Our one hands on project that we did fit in was a board game on Cortes and Montezuma from the SOTW Activity Guide.

SCIENCE

Jessie completed her unit on chemical reactions in God's Design Atoms & Molecules and began learning about acids and bases.

In this experiment, we were looking at the effect of temperature on the rate of reaction.  There were 3 glasses of water at different temperatures, and we timed how long each took to dissolve an Alka-Seltzer tablet.

We also considered the effect of surface area by comparing a whole tablet to a crushed one to a powdered one.

For our new acids and bases chapter we made an indicator solution by boiling equal parts of water and chopped purple cabbage to be used for some experiments next week.

We didn't complete any earth science work this week other than to watch our flowering rocks continue to form crystals.  Honestly, I was just too tired by the afternoon to put much effort into it, and I didn't want to finish our volcano lessons halfway.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry's had his normals ups and downs.  Violet somehow managed to convince him to pretend to sleep for their play together time on Monday.  He can be so cute.

Benny invited him to play under the tent he created in his own room.

Jessie made him a lawn mower out of Tinker toys, and they went back and forth through the house before taking them downstairs.  Sadly he used the handle as a weapon later to whack Benny upside the head, and I had to take him to the pediatrician to glue the split skin back together.

So today it was nice to see him back to is cute, sweet, snugly self.  (I'm still not sure how VIolet convinces him to do this for fun.)