Week 2: Pioneers and a Full Schedule

It hasn't been a perfect week, but overall it's been a great one. 


Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie finished up her first chapter in Foerster's Algebra and scored an 89% on her test Friday.  Her score gave me an excellent opportunity to explain the importance of studying for a math test and the importance of showing her work since I gave her partial credit for two problems that had work but no credit for incorrect answers without work.  Hopefully, we'll improve on that score over the course of the year.
• She studied subject complements, business letters, and object complements in R&S 8 and scored a 103% on her second vocabulary test.

• In CW, she's been working with verbals, verb moods, and verb tenses.
• For literature, she researched the life of John Bunyan.  We discussed her research using questions from the context section of Teaching the Classics before she wrote a summary of his life.  We then began daily reading and discussing Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.  She also read the first 15 chapters of Scott's Rob Roy, which we will discuss at the finish of the book.
• Jessie began Latin Alive 2 this week; completed the first chapter reviewing the alphabet, syllabication, and accent; and began working on chapter 2.  She also commenced book 3 of Elementary Greek, which also had a review of the alphabet, breathing marks, and pronunciation.
• For geography, she's on the last level of South and Central American countries.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet completed her first IP section in Singapore and moved on to unit 2 in her book.  The exercises are asking her to look at a three dimensional figure and then decide if it can be made by folding a two dimensional set of shapes that are connected in a certain way.  She's had a little trouble visualizing some of the problems, so we've done part of the work together.
• She aced her second spelling test of the year.  In R&S, she worked with clauses, sentences, and fragments; wrote a set of directions; and learned new terminology for the four sentence types.
• Our model for Homer this week was "Scylla and Charybdis".  I let her type her rough draft instead of writing it by hand, which made it much easier to edit at the end of the week.
• In literature, she read Grahame's The Reluctant Dragon, charted the plot with me through discussion, and then used the chart to write a plot summary of the book.
• She also began her first week of LfC C which reviewed the first two declensions and the present tense endings and embarked on her first adventure in Greek by using The Greek Code Cracker to begin learning the Greek alphabet.

Benny's 3rd Grade

• Benny finished up his first Singapore unit this week and the corresponding section in the IP book.  He moved on to section two on addition and subtraction, which is also what he has been focused on in his Miquon book. 
• In R&S 3, he learned about statements and questions (and I again wondered why on earth they call them asking and telling sentences) and diagrammed some compound subjects and predicates.  He also completed two more spelling sections in SWO C.
• In CW Aesop, he gave me a narration of "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing", which honestly I thought was well enough done that we didn't do any editing to it.  He also did some daily cursive copywork.  We've made it through R in our cursive alphabet review.
• Literature has three tracks this year.  We've using McGruffy's Second Grade reader to practice reading aloud.  Right now, I'm just having him focus on not skipping words or mumbling.  He's been reading Dolphin Adventure by Grover on his own and then narrating the events of the chapter to me.  We also started a new read aloud The Story of Dr. Doolittle. 

 HISTORY

This week's history focus has been pioneers.  Everyone has been reading Pioneer Sampler by Greenwood for a basic look at daily life of a pioneer family and a portion of Hero Tales Volume 2 by Jackson about Peter Cartwright and circuit riders.  The girls read Better Known as Johnny Appleseed by Hunt and The Story of Davy Crockett by Meadowcraft.  They wrote paragraph summary on Cartwright and had a choice between Johnny Appleseed or Davy Crockett for a longer summary.  Both of them chose the latter.  Benny and I read Johnny Appleseed by Kellogg (which I also had to reread daily to Henry who loved it) and The Story of Davy Crockett by Adler, and he gave me oral narrations of the stories.

In the spirit of Johnny Appleseed, I asked Jessie what she wanted to make from apples, and she chose to make an apple crisp.  I think she was a little disappointed that there were no leftovers since what is left in the picture was DH's portion.

Violet read about bread making in the Greenwood book and made a batch of crescent rolls.  I confess that we used our bread machine to run the dough cycle, but she had fun rolling out the dough and shaping the rolls.

Benny and I did activities from Pioneer Sampler.  We compared sugar water to plain water after it had been in the freezer for an hour after reading about how trees use sap and how the pioneers extracted it to make maple sugar.

We also shook up a cup of whipping cream,

drained off the buttermilk, rinsed the remaining butter, and added some salt for flavor.  The butter was delicious on Violet's homemade rolls.

 SCIENCE

Jessie began BJU Physical Science and completed the reading of chapter 1 covering basic definitions of science and the effect of worldviews on science.

She also completed three labs this week.  The first just covered basic safety and had her reading warning labels.  Lab 2 was designed to introduce the scientific method.  We compared the ability of distilled water, bleach water, salt water, and sugar water to conduct electricity.  Unfortunately our store brand distilled water was not very well distilled so all of our solutions ended up conducting electricity.  Lab 3 had her practicing making qualitative observations.

Violet and Benny began God's Design Atoms and Molecules.  We talked about what chemistry is and watched the reaction of vinegar and baking soda.  They also learned about atoms, the parts of atoms, and basic terms like atomic number and atomic mass and used their new knowledge to complete the above worksheets.  On Friday, we read about Marie Curie.

ELECTIVES

For art, scroll down to the previous post.  We'll add in music next week.

HENRY'S CORNER

For Henry's mom time our first part of the school year will revolve around farms and seasonal items.  I am going to be loosely following the Harvest Time Curriculum at WeeFoldArt.com, but I've added two more weeks at the beginning as well as additional books, nursery rhymes, and activities that better fit with our family.  This week we read about barns and animals on the farm with The Big Red Barn by Brown, The Very Busy Spider by Carle, Old MacDonald Had a Farm by Cabrera, Baby Farm Animals by Williams, and Winter Barn by Parnall.  Henry loved the Old MacDonald book.  By Wednesday, the girls were asking me why on earth I had checked out that book after having to listen to me singing it to Henry and Henry singing it on his own.

We made a peek-a-boo barn scene using construction paper and a muddy pig craft which is in yesterday's Creative Corner post.

We also continued our alphabet activities focusing mainly on reviewing the letter Dd this week.  In the photo, he is matching the upper case letters on the Little People Alphabet Zoo animals to the lowercase letters on the drawing board and naming the letters that he knows.  We reviewed circles, introduced the numeral six, and practiced counting to 20.