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.