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.