Week 3: Jamestown, whales, and caterpillars

MATH

Benny finished his first unit in his 2A Intensive Practice book this week.  We started unit 2 in the textbook and workbook covering addition and subtraction.  He's worked on adding without regrouping and subtracting without borrowing with bigger numbers and learned how to set the problems up in a vertical manner to add or subtract the individual places.  In Miquon he spent the week focused on subtraction.

 LANGUAGE ARTS

Benny has continued to read aloud to me from Osborne's Dark Day in the Deep Sea.  We continue to progress through The Wheel on the School by DeJong for literature.  He aced two more spelling tests this week and has now completed 5 lessons in SWO B.  For copywork this week, he wrote some more state names, the days of the week, and the months of the year.  The latter two being the topics that he covered for his grammar lessons as well.

HISTORY

This week was all about Jamestown.  We read the section covering Jamestown from SOTW 3 and completed the corresponding map.  We spent two days reading John Smith Escapes Again by Schanzer, which I highly recommend.  There is a lot of detail, but the style of writing and the abundance of pictures and maps are amazing.  Benny even picked it back up to look at when it wasn't history time (which has never happened before with a history book).  We also read a very brief biography of Pocahontas.  (It wasn't my first choice, but the other books were checked out.)

I hid small containers of peanut butter chips around the living room for Benny to hunt for gold. 

SCIENCE

For science this week, we studied abyssal animals and submersibles then began learning about whales.

 

Her we squeezed a 2 liter bottle and watched the balloon inside to illustrate the effects of water pressure at greater depths. 

Here we made our own submersible, lowered it by taking on water, and raised it by blowing in air.  Both of these activities came from Oceans for Every Kid by Van Cleave.

We started chapter 2 on whales and learned the two different types of whales, what a fluke is, and how whales swim differently from fish.  For fun we laid belly down on the bed with our feet hanging off the edge.  Then I called out either whale or fish, and we had to move our feet either vertical or horizontal.  Judging by the amount of laughter, I'd say Benny had fun.

We also learned about whales hearing and breathing and completed the activity from the Apologia text of demonstrating how sound waves can travel over a long piece of string.

GEOGRAPHY, ART, & MUSIC

Benny is up to Indiana in his fifty state song and learned the location of North and South Dakota using The Little Man in the Map.  We read about the violin, and he practiced using oil pastels to complete a hand drawing similar to the girls.

HENRY'S PRESCHOOL

Henry's preschool was a little more laid back this week because I had a lot of other projects going on.  We read several books on caterpillar's including The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Carle, The Caterpillar and the Polliwog by Kent, and  Gotta Go! Gotta Go! by Swope.  We added the color red, orange, and purple to our colorful caterpillar,

worked on fine motor skills by building peg puzzles,

and made it more challenging by using tweezers on the pegs.

He had so much fun puzzle building that he and Jessie built our 4 piece floor puzzle together one afternoon.