Week 3 - Indians, tin art, and a water battle

Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie spent the week in Foerster's Algebra reviewing operations with negative numbers.
• She finished up her first grammar unit after reviewing appositives and did very well on her chapter test.  She continues to ace her vocabulary quizzes as well.
• In writing, she worked mostly on grammar lessons this week covering the moods of verbs and chart the different verb forms.  On Friday, she ran three chreia through a shortened sentence shuffle.
• In literature, we continue working through Pilgrim's Progress with discussions focused mainly on recognizing and understanding the allusions of the text.  She is also slowly but steadily reading through Rob Roy as well.
• In chapter 2 of Latin Alive, she reviewed the endings of the first and second declension with the addition of the endings for the vocative and locative cases.  She also reviewed the uses of the nominative and accusative cases and learned about the predicate accusative as well as Latin appositives, which fit in nicely with her grammar lessons.  In EG3, she also reviewed the first two declensions in Greek and learned about declining masculine first declension nouns.
• For geography, she spent one last week reviewing the countries of Central and South America.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet completed her second IP section and began working with ratios and fractions in her Singapore textbook and workbook.
• She did very well on her first grammar test on Monday and spent the remainder of the week reviewing sentences and diagramming.  In spelling, she scored a 90% on her Friday test.
• Literature for the week consisted of reading and narrating from From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by Konigburg.  In CW, she rewrote the story of "The Old Nurse" from The Children's Homer starting in the middle of the story.  We also looked at how the scenes were developed, did sentence shuffles, and some paraphrasing.
• Violet reviewed the 3rd declension endings in LfC C, learned new vocabulary, and completed another lesson in the history reader.  She also completed another third of The Greek Alphabet Code Cracker.
• She conveniently forgot to complete her geography lessons (and is frowning at me for typing this).

Benny's Third Grade

• Benny had a brief review of addition with carrying in Singapore with smaller numbers before adding numbers within a thousand.  In Miquon, he is working on subtraction.
• In R&S 3, he worked with commands and exclamations.  He also completed two more spelling lessons in SWO C.
• We finished our review of the cursive alphabet and moved on to cursive copywork and worked with the model "The Fox and the Grapes" in CW Aesop.
• For literature, he completed reading Dolphin Adventure and began Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Dahl.  He also read aloud 5 more lessons out of the McGuffey reader, and we finished our first read aloud, The Story of Dr. Doolittle.
• For geography, I decided to change directions.  He had learned 24 states last year using The Little Man in the Map, but he could only name the states if he pointed them out in a specific order.  I pulled out my files from the girls' US state geography lapbook and had him create US booklet this week.

HISTORY

This week in history, we covered the removal of the Indians, Osceola and the Seminoles, and Sequoyah's invention of a written Cherokee language.  The girls outline from SOTW 3 and read Osceola Seminole War Chief by Blassingame, The Story of the Black Hawk War by Hargrove, and Sequoyah The Cherokee Who Captured Words by Patterson.  Both chose to write about Sequoyah.  We also completed the related map from SOTW, but as usually I removed the labels from the girls maps and asked them to write the labels in themselves.  Benny and I read the same section of SOTW 3 and the same Osceola book.  For Sequoyah, we read Talking Leaves by Kohn.  He completed 3 oral narrations and the associated map.  Everyone also continued to learn about pioneer families as we read more of Pioneer Sampler by Greenwood.

Our fun project for the week was to create pictures by punching holes in an aluminum pie pan to mimic the tin decorations of the pioneers.  Jessie opted to skip the activity.  Violet created a bird,

 and Benny made an evergreen tree.

SCIENCE

Jessie completed her first science test and moved on to chapter 2 in Physical Science.  She is a bit behind in her note taking and still working while I am typing this.  She has learning some basic chemistry concerning matter, particle theory, elements, compounds, states of matter, etc.  There were no labs scheduled this week.

Violet and Benny both did an excellent job on their first unit quiz.  We spent most of the week learning about the periodic table, what information it contains, how it is arranged, and the history of its creation.

ARTand MUSIC

For art lessons see Thursday's post.  The girls listened to the first section of The Story of Classical Music, assembled the timeline portion of their lapbooks, and added a few early figures and terms.  Benny listened to Mr. Bach Comes to Call this week.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I continued his farm theme by reading several books involving farmers this week including Farmer Duck by Waddell, Farmer Dale's Red Pickup Truck  by Wheeler, The Thing That Bothered Farmer Brown by Sloat, and Farmer Palmer's Wagon Ride by Steig.  We also enjoyed singing "The Farmer and the Dell" using a book by Rae.  In letters, he finally seems to have mastered Dd and Ee, we reviewed squares, practiced counting to 20, and introduced the number 6.

 I sent him outside with Benny one day to have fun blasting a chalk target on our basement wall.  They did a great job of soaking the target before

soaking each other as well.  Henry, as you can tell, needed a clothes change.  Benny managed to escape with only a few patches of wet here and there.