Week 3 Upper: Working into the Weekend

It was a good but not a stellar week.  Math took forever for both girls, and the distractions from noisy brothers and adorable kittens made focusing harder.  We still have some work to do over the weekend, but hopefully by the end of next week we'll be caught up again.

Jessie's 9th Grade

MATH - Jessie completed the review exercises and her first chapter test in geometry with a score.  She also began the second chapter and covered points, lines, and planes.

MUSIC - She wrote a summary about music in the ancient world from her lecture notes and took notes on the second lecture covering music in the Middle Ages.

ENGLISH - She focused on analyzing a selection for clarity and credibility this week in CW Herodotus.  The paragraph on the left covers clarity.  She still has to finish the paragraph on credibility this weekend.  She completed her first grammar test and scored well on her vocabulary.  Her first literature book is Doyle's The Lost World, which is due in two weeks for discussion.

GREAT BOOKS - We discussed "The Epic of Gilgamesh" on Monday, but she has not yet completed the writing assignment nor started listening to the background information on The Iliad.  She be working on that over the weekend as well.

LATIN - She did very well on her chapter test and the quiz I gave her on noun endings and the irregular noun vis.  She continuing to work on participles in chapter 20 covering the perfect forms.

SPANISH - Jessie completed the first lesson of chapter two this week covering church related vocabulary, definite and indefinite articles, and asking and responding to questions.  She scored a 100 on her quiz Friday.

HISTORY - There was no lecture this week.  She took notes on the empire of Mesopotamia (Akkadian, 3rd dynasty of Ur, and Hammurabi's), completed a map of Hammurabi's kingdom, and completed chapters 22, 25, and 30 in History of the Ancient World.

SCIENCE - Science is still in progress, but she'll be completing the 2nd chapter, the lab, and test over the weekend.

Violet's 7th Grade

MATH - Violet spent the week working on the review exercises at the end of chapter 1 of Lial's covering operations with integers.  She's also gotten much better at showing and work which has translated into fewer mistakes than last week.  She'll complete the chapter test Monday and move on to a chapter from NEM.

LOGIC - In Building Thinking Skills 3 Figural most of her exercises had a similar idea to the one in the picture.  We did complete two weeks in Art of Argument catching back up to speed.  Most of the information was still set up to the first lessons, and she'll start learning actual fallacies next week.

LANGUAGE ARTS - Violet continued to read Rawling's The Yearling this week and will be ready to discuss it next week.  She spent some time analyzing a Silence Dogood letter in CW and completed her first writing project with paraphrase, example, and conclusion paragraphs.  She's not halfway through her 4th lesson in Caesar's English 1, and in grammar she completed her first unit and worked on sentence type and word order.

LANGUAGES - She wrapped up lesson 4 in Latin Alive 1 this week, completed her first chapter reading, and reviewed transitive versus intransitive verbs and the direct object in lesson 5.  She is in her third week of review at the start of Elementary Greek 2.  This week she reviewed all of the 2nd declension nouns from last year and the endings for both the masculine and neuter genders.

HISTORY - Violet covered Mesopotamia this week using a portion of Usborne's Encyclopedia of the Ancient World and Mesopotamia by Shuter.  She outline two pages from the first book and used her notes from both to write the essay shown.  We did one edit where we worked mainly on organizing the information into paragraphs with topic sentences and adding some key details to make it more specific (ie. cuneiform instead of picture writing) to get what I consider a good first effort.  She also completed a map of the Fertile Crescent.

SCIENCE - She covered all of the information in chapter 3 of life science including defining a living organism, covering some cell basics, and learning the four groups of essential molecules for life.  The real focus for the week was actually learning how to take notes from a science textbook.  We started working on part A together looking for the main idea of each section and the important details given related to the main idea including defining key terms and listing examples where needed.  Then we used the objectives and section questions to check her notes to see if anything was left out.  She did parts B & C on her own and the results were much better.  We still need to do the lab and will hopefully get it done over the weekend.  Otherwise, we'll double up next week.

FINE ARTS - In music, she did an overview of the string section in Those Amazing Musical Instruments.  Her art is down in Thursday's post as usual.

Week 3 LG: The Nile, Canines, and China

Benny's 4th Grade
Math and Logic
Benny spent the week in Singapore math working through the first section of the IP book. He also completed the first of two review sections in his CWP text.

For logic, he described shapes in Building Thinking Skills 2, completed another Mind Benders puzzle in the A3 book, and played some more Rush Hour.

Language Arts

Benny reviewed subjects, predicates, and diagramming skeletons in grammar; completed the 33rd and started the 34th lesson in SWO D, and analyzed the fable "The Angler and the Fish for CW". He's been copying grammar definitions for cursive practice and working on sentences with proper nouns for dictation. In literature, he is continuing to enjoy Rabbit Hill by Lawson as his independent book and The Story of the Treasure Seekers by Nesbit for his read-aloud with me. For practice reading aloud, we used his CW fable and a page from a picture book.
Latin and Fine Arts
In Latin he began learning how to declining 1st declension nouns, ten new nouns, and basic characteristics of Latin nouns.

His art is in the previous post. For music, we read the first few pages of The Story of the Orchestra and listened to the first track of the accompaniying CD.

History

We covered chapter 2 of SOTW 1 this week on the Nile River, the unification of Egypt, and the Egyptian gods. We also read The Nile River by Fowler and completed the map and coloring page.

Add caption

For our hands on activity, Benny wasn't thrilled about the idea of constructing a minature Nile with dirt and grass in a pan, so we made a chocolate cake together instead. He drew the Nile, Rea Sea, and Mediterranean Sea in the icing. I piped on the blue icing with the large round hole type that I have, and he smoothed it out and added the animal figures. It was delicious!

Science this week covered wolves, foxes, jackals, dingoes, raccoon dogs, and African wild dogs. There weren't any associated activities this week.

Henry and I had a great week and read a ton of books. We finished My Father's Dragon and began Elmer and the Dragon by Gannett. For history, we read Croco'nile by Gerrard and Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile by de Paola. For science we read Dogs and Wolves by Gibbons. Our country for the week in geography was China. We read Count Your Way Through China by Haskins, Daisy Comes Home by Brett, Tikki Tikki Tembo by Mosel, The Magic Boat by Demi, The Story of Chopsticks by Compestine, The Story of Noodles by Compestine, and The Luminous Pearl by Torre.

Schoolwise, we reviewed some of last week's consonant pages, completed the maze section of Visual Perceptual Skill Building 1, matched shapes and decided which shape did not belong in Building Thinking Skills Primary, skip counted to 100 by 5's, played a number matching game, went for a walk to look for frogs (just for fun), and played a game of Trouble.

Creative Corner: Watering Can and Klee Style Castle

This is another project from Lifelike Drawing by Hammond.

The block style castle is made based on the style of Paul Klee using oil pastels on construction paper and these directions.

WW: Too cute

No worries. It's all under control.

Week 2 Upper: A Solid Week

Jessie's 9th Grade

Geometry this week consisted of finishing the lessons of the first chapter on logic.  Next week, she'll have some review exercises and her first test.

Jessie continued working on punctuation in R&S 9/10 and completed her first editing sheet.  Her first vocab quiz went well on Monday despite the fact that I cannot find the cards that I made, and we covered the second lesson.  In CW Herodotus, she worked with the myth of Apollo and Daphne by analyzing a confirmation and refutation of the myth as well as writing a slant narrative.  She finished reading and taking notes on Gilgamesh for her Great Books credit.  Next week, I'll have her add the literature component of her English credit as well.

In Latin Alive, she completed the final exercises of chapter 19 and took three days to work on a translation of the chapter reading.  On Friday, she had a Latin grammar quiz on the noun ending in all declensions and spent time studying the irregular noun vis, vis.  She continued working on chapter 1 of Spanish covering family names, numbers, classroom items, common classroom commands, the alphabet, and Spanish rules for syllabication.  She had her first chapter test Friday and scored a respectable B+.

In ancient history, she took notes on the second lecture of Foundations of Western Civilization, answer the second focus question of Western Civilization covering what makes a civilization, made a map of the Fertile Crescent, and read about the Haparrans and another king of China from History of the Ancient World.  We didn't manage to squeeze in our history discussion thanks to our newest distraction (see Wednesday's post), so we'll double up next week.

In biology, she completed her first chapter.  I allowed her to take the first test open book because it's more about worldview than biology, and my goal for the chapter was simply exposure not mastery.  For her lab, we reviewed the parts of a microscope, calculating the powers of magnifications, sketched prepared slides of desmids and diatoms, and discussed the problem of depth on high magnification by looking at a slide of with three different colors of thread that overlapped each other.

For fine arts, we decided to switch gears and do music appreciation instead. For week 1, she listened and took notes on the first 2 lectures of How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Greenberg. She started and needs to complete a summary about music in the ancient world. No PE hours as yet this week.

Violet did well with multiplying and dividing integers, but then struggled at the end of the week putting everything together using order of operations. We'll spend another day on the lesson next week with a focus on how to show her work which I think will make things much simpler for her.

She began reading The Yearling by Rawlings this week, did very well on her second vocabulary quiz, and worked on subjunctive complements in grammar. In CW, she began her first set of analysis lesson and focused on the example and epilogue paragraphs.

In Greek, Violet reviewed all the verbs she learned last year, the present tense endings, and the present conjugation of the verb to be. She did very well on both her chapter 2 and chapter 3 quizzes in Latin Alive.

Violet read Dry Bones and Other Fossils by Parker as well as Prehistoric Art by Hodge this week for history and wrote brief paragraphs about each.

Violet covered chapter 2 on classification in BJU Life Science and practice using a field guide to identify the class of some insects that I printed out pictures of for her.

Art is in Thursday's post. For music, she covered the pages on the orchestra in Those Amazing Musical Instruments by Helsby and listened to the samples on the CD.

Week 2 LG: Fertile Crescent and Predators

Benny's 4th Grade

Math and Logic

• Benny focused on factors and multiples this week in Singapore math.
• He continued to practice describing shapes in Building Thinking Skills 2 and completed another MindBenders puzzle and two more Rush Hour levels
• Next week, he'll start using our Flashmaster for some basic math facts drill.

Language Arts

• He continued working with subjects and predicates in grammar and completed another spelling successfully.
• For copywork, I borrowed maxims from Violet's CW book. Dictation came from a random book pulled off the shelf and focused on basic statements since he seems to have forgotten the basics of capitalization and punctuation in a sentence. For CW, he gave an excellent narration of "The Goose with the Golden Egg" on Monday, so I didn't require any editing during the remainder of the week.
• He finished Henry Huggins by Cleary and began Rabbit Hill by Larson for his independent literature. He read aloud to me The Egg by Robertson and the first page of our Disney The Rescuers picture book. Together we continued to read The Story of the Treasure Seekers by Nesbit.

His Latin covered the basics of person and number in Latin verbs, the present active tense endings, and another 10 vocabulary words. He did an excellent job with his parsing worksheet that I printed from the free additional practice sheets available online.

In history, we started the week reading the VP card about the tower of Babel. Then we covered nomads, early farmers, and the Fertile Crescent. We had a discussion about the difference in the worldview of SOTW's first chapter versus the early chapters of the Bible and reasons for those differences. There were lots of "Yuck" and "Double yuck" when we read It's Disgusting and We Ate It! by Solheim. He completed the first map, made a cave painting, and added to his notebook.

He had a blast digging through our construction paper habit in search of M&Ms to illustrate the advantages of camouflage. We scaled down the habitat from a laundry basket with 21 sheets of construction paper and decreased the amount of time he had to hunt for the candy because I didn't want to waste that much paper. The results were still in line with what we expected. We also began reading chapter 2 learning about carnivores and basic characteristics of the dog family.

Henry's Kindergarten

Henry completed a couple more pages in Phonics Pathways, matched shapes in Building Thinking Skills Primary, completed more mazes, and reviewed skip counting by 5's. We continued reading My Father's Dragon by Gannett and The Child's Bible Story Book by Egermeier. We didn't get started on our geography stories this week, but we did play a few games.

He listened in on Benny's history. We read Big Predators by for science. He cut this train from his Kumon workbook. Next week I'm hoping to be a bit more organized and add a few more activities.

Creative Corner: Basic Shapes and Cupcakes

Violet completed this pencil drawing of a sphere following the directions in Lifelike Drawing by Hammond.

Directions for Benny's watercolor cupcake came from my favorite online art blog.

WW: Another Cutie

DH and Benny found this adorable little lass wandering around our fil's backyard last Saturday evening. She was mewing pitifully and following anything that moved. Her mom never came back after being chased by one of the neighborhood dogs. DH's plan was originally for me to take her to the SPCA on Sunday but that was before she snuggled on his lap Sunday morning and the kids pleaded for her to stay.

She's been an adorable distraction during school hours spending time sleeping on the table out of the reach of the other animals and curled up on the laps of various kids.

After a few days of treating her like a toy, the other cats are getting better. Freckles likes to clean her chin after she's been drinking kitten formula, and Snowy's been cleaning her plate when she's finished her canned kitten food. Now we just have to get her trained to use the litter box.

Week 1 Upper: Starting 9th and 7th Grades

Jessie's 9th Grade

MATH

For math this year, Jessie is studying geometry using the second edition Jacobs text. We go over the lesson and work through at least part of the set 1 problems together. Then she completes the set 2 and 3 problems independently. The first chapter is a review of basic logic. This week she covered if/then statements, inverses, converses, contrapositive, etc.

ENGLISH

For English, she reviewed capitalization, end punctuation, and commas and completed a short composition for R&S grammar.  She covered the first lesson in Word Within the Word 2.  She also began CW Herodotus by writing a slant narrative, learning about its judicial use, determining the context of two books, and writing paragraphs on Herodotus and Hans Christian Andersen.  She'll add a literature components starting next week.


LATIN

In Latin, we picked back up partway through Latin Alive 2.  I've scheduled her to complete 4 days of lessons a week and one day of focused grammar memory work with the goal of taken the National Latin exam level 2 next year.  She spent the week working on participles.

SPANISH

She also started BJU Spanish 1.  I am covering the textbook material and activities with her, and then she completes the related CD and written exercises in the activity book on her own.  This week we covered greeting, numbers, introductions, adjective and professional cognates, and some family names.

HISTORY and GREAT BOOKS

She covered the first lecture of Foundations of Western Civilization by Noble, read and answered the first focus question in Spielvogel's Western Civilization covering the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods, and completed chapters 5 and 6 in History of the Ancient World by Bauer covering early India and China.

Before starting her first great book, I had her spend the first half of this week reading the first four chapters of Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had and the 9th chapter on poetry.  Thursday and Friday, she wrote a very brief context paper on The Epic of Gilgamesh, which she will begin next week.

SCIENCE

Jessie is covering biology this year using BJU Biology 4th edition and completing as many of the labs as are feasible at home.  I'd like for her to be able to complete the biology Sat 2 test in the spring because I think biology will be her strongest science, but I still need to look into how that works.  This week she covered the basics of what science is and its relation to faith as well as the basics of the scientific method and its limitations.  I've scheduled her labs for Saturdays, so I'll post about the first one next week.

OTHER

She did log an hour of PE riding her bike this week.  We'll start her Bible and Fine Arts elective next week.

Violet's 7th Grade
MATH

Violet is going to be using a combination of Lial's Prealgebra and NEM 1 this year for math. This week she began Lial's studying place value and integers. She did really well add integers on Wednesday, but struggled a bit with subtracting integers so I retaught the lesson on Friday and had her complete the even problems in the exercise for additional practice, which went much better.

LANGUAGE ARTS

Violet began R&S 7 with a review of sentence parts and a written description of a person. For vocabulary, we completed the first lesson of Caesar's English 1 and began the second. We're going to work through both books this year covering each lesson in 4 days. She began CW Diogenes learning the definition of a maxim, types of maxims, the headings used for maxims in the progymnasmata, and the basics of the paraphrase paragraph. For literature, I tortured her (based on her response) by insisting that she watch the Teaching the Classics DVDs.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE

In Latin, she began Latin Alive; reviewed the alphabet, diphthongs, and sounds; and learned the rules of syllabication, determining long versus short syllables, and identifying which syllable receives the accent when speaking. In Elementary Greek 2, she reviewed the Greek alphabet and learned the corresponding upper case Greek letters.

HISTORY

At the start of the week, she read some Bible verses to answer the question why do we study history. She wrote a summary paragraph on Archeology (Eyewitness Books) by McIntosh. She also read The Amazing Story of Creation: From Science and the Bible by Gish, answered some questions I gave her, and wrote a paragraph on archaeopteryx. I also had her complete a world map with the basics: continents, oceans, mountain ranges, etc. Apparently, we hadn't covered mountain ranges previously, so I gave her a few hints on finding them.

SCIENCE

Violet began BJU Life Science 3rd edition this week. She covered all the textbook information for the first chapter. I did not start her taking notes on the text and will let her take the first test open book because it is really more background and worldview information than science. We did complete the part of the first lab basically discussing the importance of clear directions and careful measuring during experiments in order to produce consistent data.

OTHER

She began Building Thinking Skills Figural and Art of Argument for logic. She'll start art and music next week.