Week 9: Making some adjustments

Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie worked with binomials and trinomials for the first part of the week multiplying them to make polynomials. Then she reversed the process and began factoring polynomials into two binomials for the second half.
• She continues to work with mechanics in grammar covering topics such as brackets, parenthesis, dashes, hyphens, and apostrophes.  She aced another vocabulary quiz, and made further progress reading both Pilgrim's Progress and Ivanhoe.  In CW, she continued to work on summarizing Antigone, had one lesson of discussing, and began analyzing the adverbial elements of the model.
• Her Latin chapter reviewed positive adjectives and covered comparative and superlative adjectives.  We formed them, declined them, and translated back and forth with them.  In EG3, she looked at third declension neuter nouns that end with -ma, -mata.
• Her geography and memory work were continuations from last week.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet continued to work with word problems containing percentages this week in math.
• She began a new unit in grammar on verbs,. worked with prefixes such as ab- and anti- for SWO, and began reading My Friend Flicka for literature.  In CW, we began looking at credibility.  Our model was the tale where Pooh becomes stuck in Rabbit's door.  I didn't have any old writing projects for her to analyze, so I gave her the challenge to write an original Pooh story while maintaining the credibility of the characters by staying true to their personalities.  She put a lot of effort into writing the story this week.  We're going to edit it next week.
• Violet began learning the perfect tense endings in Latin, as well as how to conjugate and translate in the perfect tense.  In EG1, she reviewed the remaining letters, diphthongs, breathing, and accents.

Benny's 3rd Grade

• Benny spent most of the week practicing multiplication of a 2-3 digit number by a single digit. On Friday, we began working on an introduction to long division. In Miquon, he's been working on a section dealing with money which has been an easy review.
• He worked with plural and possessive nouns in grammar and did very well on his spelling test.  We continued with James and the Giant Peach for independent reading and began Miss Bianca for a read aloud.  In CW, we did some analysis of the myth of "King Midas".  In addition, he completed his daily cursive copywork and a few days of dictation.

HISTORY

The girls read the TruthQuest section on Karl Marx and completed the ThinkWrite assignment of summarizing his beliefs. They looked at the revolutions and changes in Europe using Grant's 1848:  Year of Revolution.  Then it was on to the Mexican-America War.  They outlined a chapter from The Great Republic and summarizing The Story of the Alamo by Richards.   Benny and I kept our focus on America.  We spent 2 days reading the SOTW 3 section on the Alamo and the war and completed the associated mapwork.  We also read Sam Houston:  Hero of Texas by Latham over two days.  For fun, we made an Alamo facade out of gingerbread using the directions in the SOTW 3 activity guide.  With the extra gingerbread dough, Benny made several figures and attempted a cannon which is in the center at the bottom of the pan.

SCIENCE

Jessie and I backed up to chapter 3 on Monday.  I outlined each of the sections, went over them with her lectured style, and then had her compare my outlines to her notes.  Monday, we'll review for a Tuesday test.  Hopefully, the test will show better retention and an increased comprehension.  If not, I may have to reevaluate her science curriculum for the year.

Violet and Benny learned about acids and bases.  Rather than make an indicator from red cabbage.  We used pH paper left over from Jessie's labs last year and measured the pH of vinegar, lemon juice, baking soda, soap, and water.

After a lesson on salts, they put a bit of salt, lemon juice, and sugar on Q-tips and rubbed each on different parts of their tongues to see which parts of their tongues tasted the different samples most strongly.  We already read a brief explanation of batteries.

OTHER

Our art is up in the previos post.  We didn't get to music, so we'll do it over the weekend.  For Spanish, we worked on asking a person's name and answering it, reviewed some counting, and learned how to ask someone's age and answer the question.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I read stories about sheep this week including Farmer Brown Shears His Sheep by Sloat, Pelle's New Suit by Beskow, and Little Baa by Lewis.  We added the letter Kk to his alphabet on the refrigerator and continued working on counting up to 20.  He didn't want to make a sheep craft, so we skipped it.  He pulled out the snap blocks one day and connected them  all into one long section and asked me to snap the above photo of his creation.