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.