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.