Weeks 27 & 28:

It's been a long couple of weeks here.  The middle of last week, Violet discovered a bunch of "flying ants" in the basement around the double window.  They turned out to be termites, and they were also coming out in Henry's room around his window.  The kids were great sports about it.  Everybody pitched in; and we stomped, swatted, or sprayed them each time we found them coming out.  They also took turns going through and inspecting for more.  The exterminators finally came out Thursday of this week to spray around the house and foam the areas in the house.  We found a few more winged ones today, but hopefully we are almost done with them.  Needless to say, killing the flying termites took precedence over school work and blogging, but in the end we still managed to accomplish a majority of our work.  Here's a recap:

 Jessie's 7th Grade

• Jessie finished up the textbook section of NEM 1 on real numbers over the last couple weeks and began working on the workbook exercise at the end of this past week.
• She completed the R&S chapter on adverbs and worked on prepositions, conjunctions, and some poetry this week.
• In CW, she's working through the theory section of the last unit.  She did several lessons on writing a thesis statement, learned how to write an introductory paragraph, and began working on the supporting paragraphs on Friday.
• In Omnibus, we ended up dropping our lessons last week because I couldn't keep up with the reading, the termites, and the extra laundry for spring clothes.  This week, we managed to finish Geoffrey's The History of the Kings of Britain and complete another week of Tolkien's The Two Towers.  In addition to the regular discussion and recitation, I had Jessie complete a writing assignment as well.  She took the description of the story of Arthur battling the giant Retho and expanded it into a 2 and a half page story (and had fun doing it as well ;)) The picture on the right is the first page of the rough draft of the story. 
• She completed 2 weeks of EG2:  one was vocabulary review, and the other introduced deponent verbs.  We ended up dropping Latin for a several days.  She did some work with interrogative pronouns and translated her chapter reading, which I still need to check.
• We also dropped half of our logic only completed two weeks of work in Art of Argument on fallacies of presumption.

Violet's 5th Grade

• Violet has been working on averaging in Singapore 5B after completing her IP section on percentages last week.  She's been slacking a bit on her math drill but has kept up with her CWP 5 problems.
• She also completed her R&S unit on adverbs and has been working with prepositional phrases this week.

• She struggled a bit with last week's spelling lesson containing words ending in -ance and -ence, but I let her move on to a new lesson this week with words spelled with y.
• In literature, we skipped several days.  She did finish Forbes' Johnny Tremain on Friday, but we're only a few chapters into Kidnapped by Stevenson.
• In CW poetry, we tried to combine two weeks into one this week to catch up.  We worked some more with rhyme and rhythm, learned the Greek prefixes to use to name the rhythm pattern, discussed couplets and heroic couplets, and wrote a bit of poetry as seen on the right.  Dictation was also hit and miss, but we managed to squeeze in some.
• Last week in Latin she completed a review lesson.  This week she began learning about 3rd conjugation verbs.
• She did manage to keep up with her regular logic including BTS 2, MindBenders B4, and Think-a-Grams A2.

Benny's 2nd Grade

• Benny did an excellent job of keeping up with his school work (mainly because it had to be finished in order for him to go fishing). He's been working on money in Singapore 2B and in Miquon he finished with number lines and moved on to factor houses.
• He completed 3 spelling lessons over the past two weeks in SWO C, practiced identifying parts of speech, and learned about injunctions in FLL.
• We've been doing some dictation as well as cursive handwriting practice.  Last week we used short sentences about Harry Potter.  This week's sentences were about octopus.
• He's finished reading Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective aloud, and I finished reading George Washington's Socks to him.  We also finished up the last story in Egermeiers' Bible Story Book.
• He had a little bit of trouble with analogies in BTS 1 but finally figured out what they were asking and had no trouble with his Mind Benders (and even completed an extra puzzle).

HISTORY

For history, the girls outlined a chapter on the crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton from Guerber.  They learned about Betsy Ross.  Jessie read Betsy Ross and the Flag by Mayer.  Violet read Betsy Ross:  Patriot of Philadelphia by St. George, and Bennys and I read A Flag for Our Country by Spencer.  For northern locations such as Fort Ticonderoga, the girls read more Guerber, while Benny and I enjoyed Aaron and the Green Mountain Boys by Gauch.  We learned about the fall of Philadelphia.  Benny and I read Saving the Liberty Bell by McDonald and Buttons for General Washington by Roop.  This week Benny and I read Sybil's Night Ride by Winnick and Winter at Valley Forge by Knight.  The girls summarized The Story of Valley Forge by Stein, John Paul Jones by Lutz, and Molly Pitcher by Bertanzetti before outlining a section on the massacres in Cherry Valley and Wyoming Valley from Guerber.  Benny and I also read John Paul Jones: Naval Hero by Grant and Molly Pitcher by Gleiter and Thompson.  There really are so many great stories related to the Revolutionary War.

SCIENCE

Jessie completed chapter 21 on the ecosystem and chapter 22 on organism relationships.  She scored a 100% on the second test.  YEAH!!  The lab pictured above has he comparing beans sprouted with 3 plants per container versus 30 plants per container.  Needless to say it will be a couple of weeks before we finish this one.

 Violet has learned about all kinds of inventions.  Here she had some fun catapulting an eraser.

She compared the imprints from having the spools directly on the playdough versus running along Popsicle sticks to illustrate the advantage of the track system on tanks.

Benny and I finished up the section on shelled animals and have been reading about squid, cuttlefish, and octopus this week.  He'll make some more clay figures Monday after we finish the last bit of the chapter.

ART

 Violet decided to branch out on her own for art the past two weeks.  She drew a budding tree from the backyard,

and the shell house from the photo book that came with her Harry Potter movie.

Benny opted to work on his fishing skills rather than his art skills.  He also helped DH with some yard work and gardening.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I did read lots of books and sang "Mary Had a Little Lamb", but I didn't get many other activities in over the past two weeks.  He watched way too many VeggieTales videos.

He also spent lots of time playing with siblings, following DH around, and getting into mischief as usual.