Week 5: Moving Along

Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie spent the week working with the commutative, associative, and distributive properties as well as using factoring to simplify expressions in Foerster's.
• She scored another 100% on her vocabulary.  In grammar, she worked with complex sentences, compound-complex sentences, and sentence structure.  She began her first writing project in CW Diogenes Chreia, finished her contextual research for Rob Roy, and continued reading Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan.
• Jessie scored very well on her chapter 3 Latin quiz and moved on to a review of fourth declension nouns, uses of the ablative case, and the function of the vocative case in Latin Alive 2.  Her EG 3 chapter was a review of prepositions.
• She continued to work on the countries of Europe for geography and completed her logic assignments.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet completed her 3rd section of math in her textbook and workbook at the beginning of the week and spent the remainder of her time completing the corresponding IP section.
• She completed her 5th spelling lesson and spent most of her time in grammar focused on coherence on paragraphs.  For writing, she made her first attempt at writing a story in reverse using the first chapter of Genesis as her model.  She continued her reading and narrating of Lassie Come Home by .
• In LfC C, she worked with three termination adjectives, mastered her new vocabulary words, and completed her regular translation work.  In the Greek Code Cracker, she learned the final letters of the Greek alphabet.
• Her geography focus continues to be the US states, but she is on the final software level at this point.  We continued working on chapter 2 of Critical Thinking Book 1.

Benny's Third Grade

• Benny completed his Singapore textbook/workbook section on addition and subtraction with numbers in the thousands and moved on to the corresponding IP section this week as well. In Miquon, he has been working with fractions using number lines to add, subtract, or multiply and learning how to identify equivalent fractions of 1.
• He worked with punctuation of quotations, apostrophes, and reviewed the rules of capitalization in R&S 3.  We analyzed "The Crow and the Pitcher" for CW Aesop.  In literature we continued with the same books as last week with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for independent reading, McGuffey's second reader for reading aloud, and Understood Betsy as our read aloud.  He also completed his regular spelling and copywork.
• This was our first week working on state booklets for our US geography lapbook.  He completed the Alabama booklet and 2/3 of the Alaska booklet.  The picture above shows his MindBenders puzzle for the week.  He also did his assigned riddles and Building Thinking Skills exercises.

HISTORY

The girls read about Noah Webster this week in What Do You Mean by Ferris.  They learned about sectionalism, mapped the Missouri Compromise, and summarized the section of SOTW 3 covering Nat Turner's Revolt.  Jessie read Freedom's Sons:  True Story of the Amistad Mutiny by Jurmain while Violet read Amistad Rising by Chambers.  Each completed a longer summary of these events.  

Benny and I learned about James Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine reading James Monroe by Bains.  We read the same SOTW section on Nat Turner's revolt as the girls and then used the TruthQuest commentary on slavery as the basis for our discussion of the topic.  We did read the same book as Violet on the Amistad mutiny, and Benny enjoyed listening to an audio version of Uncle Remus stories.  For hands on this week, we chose another pioneer craft and dried apple slices. 

SCIENCE

Jessie continued working on chapter 3 this week on measurement covering topics such as accuracy versus precision, the use of scientific notation, and conversion of units.  We also caught up on our lab work.

We looked at two chemical reactions, burning sugar and mixing vinegar and baking soda,

and compared them to two physical reactions, dissolving salt and creating heat by stretching a rubber band.

We also did some measuring and she learned to use our digital balance.  (She's trying to hide the bubble wrap in her hands which seems to have been just as interesting as the balance.)

Violet and Benny learned about oxygen and watched the candle flame slowly decrease and then go out inside of a jar.  They both did very well with their 2nd quiz.

Then we moved on to bonding and made marshmallow models of lithium and chlorine to illustrate ionic bonding

as well as hydrogen and oxygen to illustrate covalent bonding in water.

ART / MUSIC

For art see the previous post.  For music, Benny listened to a CD of Handel's music.  The girls began learning about the Baroque period of music and added to their lapbooks.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I read about cows and goats this week with the following selection of books:  Beatrice's Goat by McBrier, The Three Billy Goats Gruff by Armold, The Milk Makers by Gibbons, Blossom Comes Home by Herriot, The Cow Who Wouldn't Come Down by Johnson, and Moo Who? by Graves.  We also sang "Hey Diddle Diddle" a time or two.  On the academic side, we continued to practice counting to 20, identifying the numbers 0-7, and added the letters Jj and Xx to our list of recognized letters.  (The latter was Henry's idea.  I guess we've played enough tic-tac-toe for him to remember it.)

On the fun side, we did some Kumon cutting and pasting and made a cow puppet out of a paper bag, which is in the previous post.  I'm still planning to make butter and ice cream with him, but our days ran so long this week that we'll do those activities over the weekend.