Week 31: Keeping On

Between dentist appointments and dawdling children it has been a loooong week.  We completed almost all of our scheduled work with a couple of long days.  Here's our week...

MATH
Jessie completed a few days of review at the beginning of the week and worked her way through the entire IP section on volume by Friday.

Violet continues to work with operations involving decimals.  This week she focused on multiplying and dividing a decimal by a whole number.

Benny completed his IP unit on division, worked through a short unit on fractions in the textbook and workbook, and began the unit on time on Friday.  In Miquon, he has made it into section H which covers fractions.


LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie is working with prepositional phrases in R&S 6.  She completed lesson 5 in CE1 and began lesson 6.  The picture on the left shows her sample personification created for CW Poetry for Beginners.  She also began reading The Prince and the Pauper by Twain for literature.

Violet is also working on prepositional phrases in R&S 4.  She rewrote "The Ant and the Dove" for CW Aesop as well as 5 days of selected passages from Harry Potter for cursive copywork.  For dictation, I've started having her repeat the original sentence out loud to me before writing (which is not a popular decision).  We're still using Prince Caspian for our selections.  She completed lesson 28 in SWO F and finished reading All Things Bright and Beautiful by Herriot for literature.

Benny completed his regular phonics work in Phonics Pathways and ETC4.  He continues to do very well with his SWO A lessons and is still plugging away one line a day on Dr. Seuss's ABC for copywork.  Additional library books that he read aloud this week included Danny and the Dinosaur, Sammy the Seal, and Albert the Albatross all by Hoff.  For literature, we completed Mountain Top Mystery by Warner.

LATIN/GREEK

Jessie completed lesson 26 in LfC C and lesson 23 in EG1 while Violet completed lesson 27 in LfC A.

HISTORY

 Jessie started the week by covering the reformers Zwingli of Switzerland, Menno Simons and the Anabaptists, and John Calvin using a combination of The Story of the Renaissance and Reformation, Famous Men of the Renaissance and Reformation, and Courage and Conviction.

 Thursday she briefly outlined the section on Copernicus in the Guerber text as well as the pages covering Ivan the Terrible in Russia: A History to 1917 by Resneck.

Violet and Benny covered Menno Simons and John Calvin using Courage and Conviction and Copernicus, Ivan the Great, and Ivan the Terrible using SOTW2. 

For hands on we decided to make Russian gingerbread men again

from the SOTW activity guide (although I used my own recipe this time).

No one minds repeating an activity that is both fun and yummy at the same time.

SCIENCE

In chemistry this week, Jessie took the quiz on the biochemistry unit on Monday. Then she worked on various topics on the application of chemistry including perfume, rubber, plastics, and fireworks.

 Here were the results from last week's decomposers experiment.  Jessie thought they were all smelly and gross.

 She started some allspice in alcohol to make a perfume.  (It actually called for whole cloves, which I didn't have so we substituted.)

 For rubber, she drew a face on a full size balloon

 and compared it to the face left after the balloon shrunk.

She also drew a picture of her own fireworks display.

This week in earth science, we caught up on labs from last week and covered the topics of soil and the Grand Canyon.

 We compared potting soil to the soil in our garden and discussed how and why it looks different.

 Next we modeled the effect of gravity on soil erosion by slowly tilting a pan of dirt and watched the amount of soil pulled down by gravity at different heights.  Then we simulated an earthquake with one side of the pan only an inch off the ground and compared the difference in the amount of dirt moved with the earthquake than with just gravity.

 Finally, we compared the amount of stream erosion in a pan with flattened dirt and

one that had the dirt terraced and discussed the differences.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry has kept himself busy this week and has gotten lots of exercise.  He's been egging various siblings into chasing him by swiping some of their things and going outside to play on the nicer days.

His number 1 choice of activity for the week has been batting balloons around either by himself or with DH or the girls.