Week 39: In Sight of the Finish Line

MATH

 Jessie continued working through her end of the year review exercises, and finished the last page of her textbook this week.

 Violet completed the IP unit on solid figures and will be moving on to the final unit on volume Monday.

Benny began working on his final math unit on money this week in Singapore 1B and continues to close in on the end of his Miquon book as well.

LANGUAGE ARTS

 Jessie finished up her vocabulary and grammar this week, so she is now officially done with her language arts for the year.

 Violet continued to do copywork and dictation as well as read and narrate from Swiss Family Robinson by Wyss.  She finished the last lesson in SWO F on Friday!

I gave Benny the option to pick whatever book he wanted to read aloud to me.  Monday he chose Curious George Goes Fishing.  Tuesday, he pulled out The Caboose Mystery by Warner.  We're working on one chapter a day.  I read the left hand page and he reads the right hand page.  He's doing great!!  He's still working through his ETC book, but completed his SWO for the year this week.

LATIN/GREEK

Jessie finished up both LfC C and EG1 this week!!

SCIENCE

Jessie began unit 4 of Properties of Matter this week covering the topics of elements, compounds, water, mixtures, and air.

 Here she's using a jigsaw puzzle to practice classifying.  She thought it was a great excuse to build one of her favorite puzzles.

 Another of her activities was to strain the pulp out of orange juice.

We also completed unit 3 on clouds in God's Design Our Weather & Water.  We studied the water cycle (and drew a picture of it), how clouds form, different types of clouds, and precipitation.

We illustrated evaporation and condensation

and measured drops of water by dropping them in flour and then drying them in the oven.

HENRY'S CORNER

No pictures this week for Henry's corner unless you want to check out the fishing in the previous post.  Other than not doing much afternoon napping, he's had a pretty typical week.

WW: Boys and Fishing

You did what!

I finally allowed the kids to watch the second Harry Potter movie over the weekend while ABC Family was having another Harry Potter weekend.  I was sure Jessie and Benny would be fine with it.  Surprisingly, it didn't bother Violet at all either.  She really enjoyed it.  Apparently, however, there was one unforeseen downside.  Here's our conversation today:

V:  Mom, did I tell you I saw a really big spider in your office this morning?
Me:  What kind of spider?
V:  I don't know.  It was big with hairy legs.
Me:  Well, did you kill it?
V:  No, I thought it looked like Aragog, so I decided to name it Aragog the second.  Then it disappeared.
Me:  Next time please kill the spider first and name it later, or I won't let you watch that Harry Potter movie again.
V:  OK.

Week 38: Almost done...

MATH

Jessie completed her final unit in the IP book this week and began working on the end of the year review material in the textbook.  (Don't ask me why she like working on the floor.)


Violet quickly completed the IP section on symmetry and began a new textbook section on volume. 

Benny spent the week working on the IP section covering addition and subtraction within 100.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie continues to plug through the final lessons of R&S 6 covering usage of a Bible concordance and dictionary, synonyms and antonyms, and sentence variety and word families.  She's looking forward to finishing next week.  We also plugged along with CE1, completing lesson 13 and covering most of lesson 14.  For literature, I gave her By Pike and Dike by Henty to begin read this week with the goal of finishing it next week.


Violet continues with regular copywork and dictation, completed her 34th spelling lesson (2 to go), and continued reading Swiss Family Robinson by Wyss.

Benny FINISHED Phonics Pathways!!!!  WooHoooo!!  His reader for the week was Nate the Great and the Missing Key by Sharmat .  He also completed his regular ETC, SWO A, and copywork.  We didn't make much progress on literature this week.  Benny kept disappearing outside after each rainstorm to go hunting for fishing worms.  Apparently he found an abundant supply because DH said something about sorting through the can and releasing a few into the garden.

LATIN/GREEK

Jessie finished lesson 29 in EG1 this week and worked on the review material in lesson 32 of LfC C.  Violet finished LfC A!!!!!

SCIENCE

Jessie covered solids, liquids, gases, and gas laws this week.  I didn't get a lot of pictures.  (It's hard to get up when the thunderstorms keep waking the toddler up during the night.)  For solids she identified solids around the house.  For liquids she compared the viscosity of several different ones by watching the speed at which each moved down a slanted pan.

For gases, we compared the ability of a cold tennis ball and a room temperature tennis ball to bounce.  (The dog did not appreciate the ball's cold temperature when it was returned.)

We also compared the size of a balloon at room temperature

to the size of the balloon after 15 minutes in the freezer and measured a 2 inch difference.

For earth science, we did completed lesson 8 and the vocabulary crossword and quiz for unit 2.  There weren't any hands on activities for that particular lesson.  I'm planning to revise our schedule next week so we work on science before lunch to finish up for the year.

HENRY'S CORNER

 Henry what have you been up to?

Apparently the space shuttle was the most delicious part of his birthday cake.

 He spent lots of time this week playing with new birthday presents,

and doing whatever his siblings told him not to do.  Although most of those results weren't nearly this cute.

WW: Henry turns 3!!

Henry had a great birthday!

There was plenty of homemade cake (although I was a bit disappointed that none of the older kids recognized the two constellations without help)

to end our delicious (but not nutritious) dinner of fish sticks and potato chips.  (Yes, I did let the 3yo make menu selections.)

There were classic presents enjoyed by previous children to pass on,

fresh supplies of consummable items, and

fun gifts from grandparents.

Week 37: Entering the Home Stretch

MATH
Jessie completed her final textbook unit on more challenging word problems this week and began working on the corresponding unit in the IP book. While she's not finished with math yet for the year, it's encouraging to see that she is down to the year-end review at last.

Violet completed her IP section on measurement and

spent two days on review exercises this week. Thursday, she started a new section in the textbook and workbook on symmetry. After the past few weeks, it a nice change of pace for her. She did a combination of drawing lines of symmetry, identifying whether or not a line drawn through a figure was or was no a line of symmetry, and completing a drawing given the figure on one side of a line of symmetry.

Benny completed his textbook and workbook unit on addition and subtraction within 100 and began the corresponding unit in his IP book this week.  His Miquon exercises have focused on the relationship between multiplication and division.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Jessie read Lassie Come Home by Knight for literature this week and continues working through CE1.  In grammar, she completed her 10th unit on Friday and is very excited to have only 5 lessons remaining for the year.

Violet continues working through The Swiss Family Robinson by Wyss for literature and completed her regular amount of copywork, dictation, and spelling.  She was extremely excited to complete her final grammar test for the year.  Yeah!! 

Benny is counting down the days until he completes his last lesson in Phonics Pathways.  (5 more to go!)  He read aloud Nate the Great by Sharmat and worked on the Dr. Seuss passage for the letter O for his copywork.  For literature, we continue to work through The Happy Hollisters on a River Trip by West.

HISTORY

We finished our LAST week of history this week!!!  YEAH!!!

Jessie read about Galileo and the Roanoke Colony using Miller's The Story of the Renaissance and Reformation and Guerber's The Thirteen Colonies.

 Violet and Benny read the corresponding sections from SOTW

 and watched a video called Galileo from the Animated Hero Classics series.

Besides the normal map work, we took turns dropping a ping pong ball and tennis ball off of the back porch to replicate Galileo's experiment at the Tower of Pisa.

SCIENCE

Jessie continued her chemistry this week studying buoyancy, physical versus chemical reactions, and phase changes.

 We compared the buoyancy of a clay ball versus a flattened boat shaped piece of clay and

 compared the density of vegetable oil versus water and rubbing alcohol.

 We dissolved salt in water to demonstrate a physical change

 and boiled the water away to recover the salt.

 We contrasted this to the reaction of lemon juice and baking soda.

She also demonstrated several phase changes by melting ice, boiling the water, and holding a mirror over the steam to allow condensation.  Our half-filled quart of water is still freezing so that she can see how ice takes up more space than water.

In earth science this week, we completed the first unit and three lesson of unit 2.  Topics included weather, weather versus climate, and climate before and after the Genesis Flood.

Here we demonstrate the rising of warm air by holding the paper spiral over the lamp and watching it begin to spin. 

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry has had plenty of fun this week

 building forts with his brother on the sofa and

flipping upside down with his big sister.  He also loved the Galileo video that his siblings watched for history.