Week 1: Starting up slowly

I had several goals for our first week of school:  getting used to the new schedule, reengaging the kid's brains to focus on their work, reviewing Latin grammar and vocabulary with the girls, keeping Henry out of mischief, improving his play times with his siblings, and making a morning devotional time a priority.  For schoolwork, we focused on starting math, language arts, Latin review, memory work review, geography and art.  We had a few hiccups and adjustments, but overall the week has gone very well.

Jessie's 8th Grade

Jessie started off Foerster's Algebra with some easy review this week of order of operation, exponents, and mathematical expressions.  In R&S 8, we reviewed sentences, subjects, predicates, subject complements, and basic diagramming.  We began Word Within the Word volume 1.  She enjoyed  watching me look up words that I could place in sentences but for which I could not really give a good definition.  She scored a 100% on her first quiz.  In CW, she focused on identifying a chreia, recognizing types of chreia, distinguishing maxims and chreia, analyzing verbs in a model, and putting statements in logical form.  For literature, we did a refresher of literary anaylsis this week by watching the DVDs from Teaching the Classics.  She picked back up working on countries of South America for geography.  In Latin, she review vocabulary using a combination of FlashDash online and flash cards with me.  I had her conjugating verbs from each conjugation in the present and perfect systems, declining verbs from all 5 declensions; declining third conjugation adjectives; and reviewing possessive, reflexive, relative, and interrogative pronouns.  We also reviewed Greek vocabulary and grammar from last year orally.  Finally, Jessie began logic by completing 9 pages of Building Thinking Skills 3 Verbal this week.

Violet's 6th Grade

Violet completed a drill worksheet for each of the four operations this week and did very well.  I'll have her continue with the Flash Master this year to continue to improve her speed.  She began working on the review section of CWP 5 and completed her first unit in Singapore 6 on expression with variables.  In R&S 6, she also worked with sentences, fragments, subjects, and predicates.  I had her try the writing exercise on Thursday, which asked her to write about a problem and how it was solved.  She gave me a one sentence story.  She scored a 95% on her first spelling test.  In CW, we learned about verbals, did a sentence shuffle, and rewrote a model about Ulysses and the Sirens by starting in the middle of the story.  For literature, I had her read a difference Beatrix Potter story each day, and we used that as a basis to introduce the 5 elements of stories.  Geography was a review of the US states, and she moved up to the next level of the geography game.  For Latin, she reviewed vocabulary using FlashDash and did a combination of conjugating verbs, declining nouns, and copying the charts for demonstrative pronouns which she hasn't quite memorized.

Benny's 3rd Grade

Benny began Singapore by working with numbers in the thousands.  He identified place value, compared numbers, put them in order, and wrote them in number and word format.  His Miquon Yellow book has been a review of addition.  He also began the review section in the CWP 2 book.  He started spelling at lesson 19 in SWO C where we left off in the spring and completed a lesson and a half.  His ability to write in cursive apparently leaked out of his brain over the summer, so we started Tuesday reviewing 2 letters a day and connecting the letters in words.  Once we've made it through the alphabet, we'll switch to straight copywork.  We also began CW Aesop this week.  Our model was "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing".  I explained what a fable is.  He narrated the story to me orally.  We alphabetized the words in the story beginning with the letter s, marked and counted sentences, and wrote a sentence from dictation.  In grammar, we began R&S 3 learning about sentences and statements.  For literature, we finished both The Bicycle Mystery by Warner and The Marvelous Land of Oz by Baum.  For geography, he did a variety of activities including building our North America puzzle.

Art

The girls' art project for the week including a quick review of the five elements of shape which they previously learned from Brookes' Drawing With Children.  Then as a warm up for the year, I challenged them to write their names in block letters and fill them in with different elements.

This is the example that I did for Jessie.  She agreed to give art a try if I did the projects as well and posted my pictures online with hers.

Here is one of Jessie's letters.

Violet in typical fashion went above and beyond doing both her first and last name as well as pictures in the corners of the paper.

Benny completed this hot air balloon project using construction paper, Sharpie markers, and a white soft pastel.

Henry's Corner

Henry and I read lots of picture books.  He was able to correctly match up all of the letters that we covered last year but couldn't remember the name of the letters D and E.  We worked on those letters this week.  He also remembered the numbers 1-5 from last year and is close to counting up to twenty.  Having activities for him to do alone and with each of his siblings made the week run much more smoothly.

 He and Jessie went to a nature walk and caught a small butterfly.

 By Friday, he and Violet were able to come up with their own activity and created a marble run from wooden blocks and a small piece of noodle.

He and Benny got a lot of mileage out of the noodle sections that I cut on Thursday.  Using them with both our beach ball and a balloon.  It was great to see them all playing together and having fun with far less quarrels and bickering than this summer.