Week 40: Transitioning to Summer (last 2 weeks)

MATH

• Jessie has finished her textbook, workbook, and IP review and will continue to work on her CWP review sections over the summer.
• Violet has finished her textbook, workbook, and IP books.  She has 2 pages left in her CWP for the year
• Benny has finished his textbook and workbook.  We're continuing to work on his IP, CWP, and Miquon hoping to have some more books finished next week.

LANGUAGE ARTS

• Jessie and Violet were off for the week.
• Benny continues to read to me daily and complete a line of copywork and a couple of ETC pages.

SCIENCE

Jessie has had a busy week of yummy science labs.

 Here she was comparing the solubility of sugar, salt, and baking soda in water.

Gotta love kitchen chemistry.

 She compared the rate at which life savers dissolved in cold, warm, and hot water as well as the difference between crushed and whole life savers.  The leftovers were yummy.

 We compared the density of regular versus diet soda by seeing which can would float in water.

Then she used the recipe in the book to create her own soda.

 Henry's favorite part was the recipe for making ice cream.  (We used almond milk, and it turned out very well.)

We also did a few lessons in Our Weather & Water  this week covering air masses & weather fronts, wind, and thunderstorms.  Here's Benny reducing the air pressure inside an empty two liter to watch it get crushed.  We also tried to generate some static electricity but were unsuccessful.
ART

We started up art this week.

 Jessie is using Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Edwards.  She did some symmetrical drawing one day and attempted to copy an upside down drawing the second day.  (I though it turned out very well, but she wouldn't let me take a picture because she didn't like it.  Benny and Violet did some watercolor one day and completed the test for Drawing With Children by Brookes to determine their level on another day.

GEOGRAPHY

Violet and Benny started learning some US geography this week.  (Jessie successfully labeled all 50 states and named almost all of the capitals so I'm just going to let her play online geography games once a week.)  To learn all of the names of the states, I'm teaching them a song that I remember from elementary school called "Fifty Nifty United States".  So far we've covered the first 7 in the alphabetical list.  To place the states correctly on the map, we're using The Little Man in the Map by Martonyi.  This week we cover the man and the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  We outlined Mim on a large laminated blank map and each of them got to draw in part of his features.  My hope is to have covered all 50 states by the end of the summer, so we can shift to learning capitals and other information about the states this fall.