Week 21: More Sick Kids

We had a bit of a rough week.  Henry managed to spread his germs to both Jessie and Violet.  Jessie was sick at the beginning of the week, and Violet around the middle.  Benny escaped the germs by heading outside to enjoy the beautiful, unseasonably warm weather.

Jessie's 7th Grade

• Jessie finished up chapter 7 in Lial's on percents.  The real life application problems with earned interest, simple interest loans, sales tax, discount pricing, and restaurant tipping made the material more interesting this week.
• We took another week off from Omnibus partially because Jessie was sick at the beginning of the week and partially because we were still waiting on the next book to arrive.
• In CW, we began our 3rd writing project.  Unfortunately, I realized when she had written her rough draft that she had read ahead and looked at the finished sample at the end of the chapter.  I gave her a new fable and maxim this morning, and she's written a new rough draft which we will edit next week.
• She complete lesson 15 in Caesar's English and worked with degrees of adjectives and verbals as adjectives in R&S.  Friday's assignment was descriptive writing.  I particularly liked her rooster description in #5 and her description of an old truck in part B.
• She focused on the dative case in Greek, and we spent some extra time shoring up her vocabulary.  (My fault for not reviewing more frequently).  In Latin, she completed lesson 21 on irregular adjectives and verbs and negative commands.  We looked at foreign views of the US Constitution and completed a chapter and unit test on fallacies for logic.

Violet's 5th Grade

• Violet continued working with decimals this week with a focus on dividing by 10, 100, and 1000.
• She completed Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Brill's Madeline Takes Command in literature this week.  She started Amos Fortune, Free Man for her historical fiction selection and will have a new challenge book on Monday.
• She scored a 100% on her spelling test!!!
• "The Tale of Circe" was her model for CW Homer this week.  All of our sentence shuffles seem to finally be paying off.  She gave me a carefully written rough draft with good detail and description.  The only change she had to make was correct one misspelled word.  YEAH!!
• We did a mixture of book selections for dictation.  She worked on limiting and descriptive adjectives in grammar and completed her regular Building Thinking Skills  and Mind Benders B3 exercises.
• Latin consisted of learning the 3rde declension I stem endings, new third declension nouns, and a mixture of practice exercises.

Benny's 2nd Grade

• Benny completed his section on mental addition and subtraction in his Singapore textbook and began the corresponding IP section.  His Miquon exercises were mainly a mixture of review topics.
• He continued reading Speare's The Sign of the Beaver to me.  I finished reading Estes' Ginger Pye to him, and we began reading Mary Jemison Seneca Captive by Gardner as it was too long to fit into just our history time.
• In grammar, he learned about helping verbs and started memorizing the list of helping verbs.  We finished copying the definition of a verb and started on the list of helping verbs for copywork.  In cursive handwriting, we're up to the letters Oo now.
• He completed memorizing the poem God Hath Not Promised and is very close to finished Psalm 100 but still skips sections at times.

HISTORY

Our history focus this week was on the French and Indian War or the Seven Years War.  All the kids read about the French building forts along in the Ohio valley, how George Washington acted as a messenger and tried to build a fort, and the mistakes of General Braddock.  The girls read from Guerber's The Story of the Thirteen Colonies and Benny from SOTW 3.  The girls also learned about Wolfe and the battles in Canada from Guerber as well as the war in India and the black hole of Calcutta from Marshall's Our Island Story.  With Benny I decided to take a different tack this week and add in more historical fiction.  He enjoyed Edmonds' Matchlock Gun and the portion of Gardner's Mary Jemison:  Seneca Captive that we have read thus far.  He did complete the associated mapwork from SOTW 3 as well.

SCIENCE

Jessie has learned about fish and amphibians this week.  For some insane reason I scheduled her frog dissection for Friday afternoon.  We'll either do it over the weekend or on Monday instead.

Violet learned about pendulums and proved that the period of a pendulum is not affected by mass or height but by the length of the pendulum.  (The book called for washers, but we substituted canning rings instead.)  She finished a vocabulary review and quiz before moving on the the final unit.

Her challenge on Thursday after reading about machines used in history was to build a structure with wooden blocks without touching the blocks.  She could use a combination of levers, wedges, and rollers.  She managed quite well with just two toothpicks.

Benny and I finished reading about fish.  He made a clay tuna, flounder and two angelfish for his ocean box.  We also started read about cartilaginous fish and measured our living room to see if a manta ray with a 22 foot span would fit.  Benny's solution:  "Well, we could turn it diagonally and it might work."

GEOGRAPHY / ART

Jessie continues to work on South American countries.  Violet is on level 4 of the states challenge.  Benny is up to Washington in his song and ready for new states on the map as well.

 For art, Violet chose to paint a vase of flowers,

and Benny opted to draw a turkey although it obviously does not fill the entire page of paper.

HENRY'S CORNER

 Henry learned about the letters Bb this week.  We stamped them on the drawing board, traced the magnets with our fingers, pointed them out on the front of his Bible, and practiced finding them in a mixture of letters on the fridge.

We also learned about the number two.  Henry's favorite activity was placing the correct number of pieces of candy corn on the correct number.  Yummy math is always the best.

In addition to our regular reading, we sang the rhyme "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and did a few cutting pages this week.  He also did lots of drawing on paper as seen above and on the drawing board as seen in Wednesday's post below.