Week 20: With a Little Snow

Jessie's 8th Grade

• Jessie continued working with exponents and powers in Foerster's algebra learning how to combine exponents with the same base in multiplication and division, how to use negative exponents, and the basics of scientific notation.
• Jessie finished her grammar section on verbs after working on active versus passive verbs although she does still own me a story from the writing assignments.  The next section is on pronouns and began with a review of the characteristics of personal pronouns.  In vocabulary, we covered lesson 17.  In CW, she has caught back up and completed her 4th writing assignment.  We began two new literature books:  Oliver Twist by Dickens and Children of the New Forest by Marryat.
• In Latin, she finished the grammar portion of chapter 13 covering the perfect passive indicative case and the related ablative of agent.  She completed her 18th EG lesson as well.

Violet's 6th Grade

• Violet continued to work on division with fractions this week as well as a few word problems.
• Her grammar has covered demonstrative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, and relative pronouns.  She successfully completed another spelling lesson and finished her last week of CW Homer!!  Next week we'll move back into Poetry for Beginners.  For literature, she began reading National Velvet.
• In Latin, her grammar was focused on forming singular and plural commands with a brief review of how to form questions as well.  She actually did her Greek lessons independently, but I believe she continued working with second declension neuter nouns.

Benny's 3rd Grade

• Benny completed his money section in the textbook and workbook and began working on the corresponding IP section this week bringing him closer to completing his 3A books.  In Miquon, he did a review of subtraction with borrowing.
• Reading was a continuation of last week:  Pinnochio by Collodi for independent reading and The Black Cauldron by Alexander  for a read aloud.  To work on his reading aloud, we have moved on to the McGuffey 3rd grade reader.
• He only missed one word on this week's spelling test.  We covered direct objects in grammar, worked on proper capitalization and punctuation of direct quotations in dictation, copied a portion of a Psalm for cursive practice, and narrated the tale of "Mercury and the Woodman" for CW.

HISTORY

We began our week of history with David Livingstone reading Hearts and Hands by Withrow.  The girls covered the TruthQuest commentary on Charles Darwin, and then we shifted our focus to Europe.  Benny and I spent two days covering all the chaos in France after Napoleon I until the ousting of Napoleon III plus the rise of Prussia, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Second Reich using SOTW 4.  The girls read the chapter in one day, outlined the section on Prussia, and moved on to read a chapter from This Country of Ours covering the presidency of Andrew Johnson.  Finally, we briefly touched on prairie pioneers.  The girls read Grasshopper Summer by Turner.  I also put A Lantern in Her Hand by Aldrich in their library crate to read on their own time.  Benny and I  read Clouds of Terror by Welch on the grasshopper plagues and Sod Houses on the Great Plains by Rounds. 

He seemed to think it was funny that a snake might fall down in the middle of dinner or a cow might wander onto the roof and crash through one of the houses built on a hillside.  We also did our first hands on activity in awhile.  I made a large pan of brownies which we cut into one inch by two inch rectangle blocks and then assembled to make our own "sod" house.  It would have been more realistic to add shredded coconut into the mix to simulate grass and to leave off the icing and use toothpicks to hold the house together, but since we also wanted to eat the results, we left out the coconut and used icing simply because it tastes better.

SCIENCE

Violet and Benny completed their second unit in Properties of Matter after studying buoyancy this week.

We compared the buoyancy of a piece of clay shaped in a ball to one flattened into a raft

and noted the difference in the buoyancy of cooking oil in water and rubbing alcohol.  On Friday we began unit 3 by learning about the difference between physical and chemical reactions, but since the kids had already seen the hands on activities, we just discussed them.

OTHER

For art, see Thursday's post.

HENRY'S CORNER

Henry and I continued his calendar activities, worked on identifying numbers up to 30, added Rr and Ss to our current alphabet magnets, and read books about snow in addition to various other books of his choice. He was very proud to help me in the kitchen on Thursday by unloading the silverware from the dishwasher for the first time.