Week 25: Wacky Weather

The weather has been wacky this week.  One day feels like winter and the next it's looking like spring outside.  We've even had a couple of thunderstorms.  Inside we kept plugging away at our school and completed all of our scheduled work for the week.

 Jessie's 7th Grade

• Jessie and I backed up and did some more practicing with exponents at the beginning of the week before moving on to adding and multiplying polynomials at the end of the week in Lial's Prealgebra.
• In R&S, she spent 4 days practicing with adjectives and adverbs as single words, phrases, and clauses and differentiating between them in a sentence.  She also did a brief oral presentation on making cookies.  She began the final lesson in CE2 this week, and began working on the 4th analysis and imitation section of CW.
• In Omnibus, she continued to work through The History of the Kings of Britain by Monmouth covering the introduction of Christianity, the abandonment by the Romans, the treachery of Vortigern, and the introduction of the boy Merlin.  We also finished Henty's Winning His Spurs.
• In Latin, she worked on reflexive pronouns.  She continued working on the imperfect tense in EG2.
• We looked at cause and effect in Critical Thinking in US History and learned the fallacy of moderation and the is-ought fallacy in The Art of Argument.

Violet's 5th Grade

• Violet worked very hard this week converting between fractions, decimals, and percentages as well as solving problems with percentages in Singapore 5.
• In LA, she reviewed punctuation with commas and apostrophes in R&S, completed a review lesson in SWO, and did more dictation.  She continued to analyze rhyme, rhythm, and stanzas in CW poetry and did some synonym substitution to complete the rewritten poem on the right.
• In addition to continuing to read Johnny Tremain, she completed reading Little Lord Fauntleroy by Burnett and began The Wolves of Willoughby Place by Aiken.
• Her Latin lesson for this week covered the final demonstrative pronoun iste, ista, istud along with additional vocabulary.  She worked with Venn diagrams in BTS2 and completed another Mind Benders puzzle from the B3 book.

Benny's 2nd Grade

• Benny completed a couple of review pages in his Singapore textbook and began the corresponding IP section on multiplying and dividing with 4, 5, and 10.  His Miquon continues to center around place value, and we discussed being more careful in reading word problems to make sure the answer actually answers the question.
• He finished writing out the cursive alphabet, and we began cursive copywork using Dr. Seuss' ABCs.  He completed some grammar copywork on contractions and had his first try at dictation on Friday.
• Grammar covered contractions.  In SWO B, he finished lesson 1, completed lesson 2, and started the third lesson this week.
• We continue to read Warner's The Mystery of the Lake Monster together.  This week he has been reading The Bears on Hemlock Mountain by Dagliesh to me.
• His BTS 1 has centered on Venn diagrams and categorizing items by their characteristics.  He completed 2 more Mind Benders puzzles as well.

HISTORY

This week in history, we learned about the battles of Lexington and Concord, Samuel Adams, Ethan Allen, Henry Knox, and the battle of Bunker Hill.  This girls read about Lexington and Concord from The Story of the Thirteen Colonies by Guerber.  Jessie outlined the two chapters, and Violet wrote a summary.  Benny and I looked at the battle from both sides by reading Benchley's George the Drummer Boy and Sam the Minuteman.  We also enjoyed The Remarkable Ride of Israel Bissell by Schick for fun.  Everyone read Why Don't You Ride a Horse, Sam Adams? by Fritz.  Jessie read Ethan Allen by Aronson, while Violet outlined a potion on Ethan Allen from This Country of Ours.  We all enjoyed the story of Henry Know bringing cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston reading Henry Knox:  Bookseller, Soldier, Patriot by Silvey.  An even better book on the subject is Reit's  Guns for General Washington which sadly our library no longer has a copy of, but I highly recommend.  Finally, while the girls read about Bunker Hill from Guerber, Benny and I enjoyed King George's Head Was Made of Lead by Monjo for an interesting British perspective on the war.

SCIENCE

Jessie's been studying sexual reproduction this week in life science.

Violet built a bridge to hold a toy train,

completed a paper model of a cylinder in an engine, and learned how a jet engine works.

Benny and I read about mollusks, crabs, hermit crabs, scallops, barnacles, and sea snails.  He also caught up on his figure making complete a ray, a lobster

a manta ray, and a spider crab.

ART / GEOGRAPHY

Jessie continues to work on South America, and Violet on North America.  Benny and I continued working on the southeastern United States.

Violet decided to skip the regular art lessons and draw a budding maple tree in our yard instead.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I continue to work on the letters A-D.  At the beginning of the week, he was still mixing up B and D and couldn't seem to remember C at all.  We spent two days playing a game where I called out a letter and he ran to the fridge and brought back the magnet.  We also outlined the letters C, c, D, and d with Sequence Jr. chips on our drawing board.  Our nursery rhyme for the week was "Hickory, Dickory, Dock", and we played mice running back and forth across the room to climb up and down our clock.  His favorite game of the week was for number practice.  I wrote the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on separate index card.  After turning the cards face down, he turned one over, and we jumped how ever many times the number on the card says.  He actually had so much fun that he asked Benny to play with him again later.  After 2 days he has those numbers down so we can move on to the number 4 next week.

His favorite story of the week has been Jack and the Beanstalk which he calls the stomping book.  After I read it in the morning, he bring it to Jessie to read for their play time and then hits up DH for a third reading in the evening.