Week 31: A Lighter Week

It was a bit of an odd week for us. Originally we were expecting my Mom on Wednesday, so I had scaled back some of our school work for the week. Then my grandfather passed away on Monday, so her plans were changed. We added a few things back in but still ended up with a lighter week overall.

 Jessie's 7th Grade

• Jessie finally started some new material in NEM.  She worked with variables, combining like terms, and applying the distributive property this week.
• R&S has covered quotations inside quotations, the use of colons and semicolons, as well as word choice in writing.
• In CW, she finished up the last analysis lesson.  She just has one writing section left before we move on to poetry.
• We ended up taking the week off from Omnibus.  Our library only had one version of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", which turned out to be an original version with original Old English spelling.  I gave up on the first page and told her we'd order the Tolkien version.  It just wasn't worth the headache to me.
• In Latin, she took a breather and just reviewed vocabulary this week.  She did finish lesson 29 in EG2.

 Violet's 5th Grade

• Violet has been working with graphs in Singapore 5B.
• Her grammar has been a mixture of punctuation and dictionary skills with a writing lesson on using descriptive language thrown in for good measure.
• In CW, she learned about trochaic meter and tercets and got to write a Haiku on Friday. 
• Spelling was a review lesson.  We also did some dictation.
• In literature, she continued reading Stevenson's Kidnapped, finished Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, and started The Fair American by Coatsworth.
• For Latin, she spent a week on vocabulary review as well.

Benny's 2nd Grade

• Benny finished up his textbook section on fractions and began working in his IP book for Singapore.  In Miquon, he finally finished with square numbers and moved on to a few lessons on measurement.
• In grammar, we reviewed the parts of speech that we have covered so far.  For dictation, we needed to cover capitalization before we do our state testing, so I made up short sentences with the pronoun I or proper nouns and we talked about capitalizing for titles.  He also continued his cursive copywork.
• Benny also finished up a review lesson in spelling this week.
• For reading, he finished Ralph S. Mouse by Cleary and began Socks by Cleary.  For read-aloud, we finished A Spy in Williamsburg and began the sequel Drumbeats in Williamsburg.

HISTORY

We scaled back our history lessons for the week due to a dentist appointment and simply focused on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the artist Benjamin West.  Jessie read Our Independence and the Constitution by Fisher and Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin by Henry.  Violet read A More Perfect Union by Maestro, The Bill of Rights by Colman, and the Henry book for Benjamin West.  Benny and I read the Maestro and Colman books with adding commentary from Mom to help him follow them and The Boy Who Loved to Draw by Bannaker.  All three completed a map showing the colonies and land claimed by the US after the treaty with Britain. 

SCIENCE

Jessie learned about the skeletal and muscular systems this week and looked at prepared slides of bone and muscle. 

Violet made water clocks by punching a hole at the bottom and side of a milk carton and watched to see which one finished first.  She also took a quiz and began learning about medical technology such as X-rays and ultrasounds.

Benny and I have been learning about jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals.  He'll have some more figures to make next week after we finish the chapter.

ART

Violet decided to draw the jellyfish from the front of Jessie's science book for art this week.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry's had a stuffy nose all week.  He actually took a nap on my lap one afternoon which gave me a good excuse to kick back and watch tv.  We have been reading, but didn't add any new letters or numbers this week.