The past couple of weeks have been a little crazy. The girls and I are fine tuning our schedule, working on a balance between enough quiet to focus while still allowing the boys to play, and trying to get used to not working on every subject together every day. I've also been distracted trying to get together items to sell at our local consignment sale. Hopefully everything will settle out next week. Here's a recap of the past two weeks.
Jessie completed chapter 2 on points, lines, and planes in Jacob's Geometry, scored an A on her second test, and began learning about rays and angles in chapter 3.
In English, she completed the review, first chapter test, and learned about listening skills in chapter 2 of R&S. We opted to skip the three lessons dedicated to creating an oral report and have her spend that time instead choosing a topic for her first history paper. She's completed two more vocabulary lessons and scored A's on her tests. In CW, she's analyzed excerpts of historical accounts and written paragraphs relating to the probability, plausibility, propriety, and expediency of the passages. She also completed the reading portion of her first literature selection
Lost World by Doyle.
For her Great Books credit, she has been steadily working her way through Homer's
Iliad taking notes and listening to the corresponding Vandiver lectures. As of Friday, she has listened to 5 lectures and read 10 books.
Jessie has continued working with participles in Latin, completed chapters 19 and 20 of
Latin Alive 2. She's also been reviewing the formation of various adjectives for her grammar memory work. In Spanish, she covered chapter 2 lessons 2 and 3 learning vocabulary related to home and school, definite and indefinite articles, uses of de, and different ways to ask questions. Both subjects are going well so far.
In Ancient History, she has completed the section on Mesopotamia and begun working on Egyptian history in Spielvogel. She completed taking notes on her third lecture by Noble, read another six chapters of
History of the Ancient World, and filled in maps of the Happaran civilization and ancient Egypt. She has decided to take her second focus question on the development of civilization in Mesopotamia and expand its content for her first research paper.
She's fallen a week behind in Biology, which I've told her will be caught up over Thanksgiving break. She completed chapter 2 on organic chemistry and scored a solid B on her test. We ran the osmosis lab this weekend measuring the change of mass in three different sections of dialysis tubing containing a sugar water solution, a second solution with twice the sugar concentration, and plain water. She'll be completing her first lab write up on this as well. She's also begun taking notes on chapter 3 covering cells.
Her music appreciation credit is going well. She's written a summary of her notes on music in the Middle Ages, listened to a CD of Gregorian chants, and taken notes on 3 lectures covering music during the Renaissance both for the church and outside the church.
I don't think she has logged any PE hours the past couple of weeks. I'm hoping we can work that in more regularly starting next week.
Violet completed her first chapter test in Lial's Prealgebra and began working on the first chapter of NEM 1 over the past two weeks. Along with a quick review of order of operation and exponents, she worked on prime factorization, highest common factor, lowest common multiple, and number patterns.
In
Art of Argument, we've covered our first two ad hominem fallacies: ad hominem abusive and ad hominem circumstantial. She's also completed 16 more pages in
Building Thinking Skills 3 Figural.
Her grammar topics over the past couple weeks have included clauses in sentences; differences in simple, compound, and complex sentences; topic sentences; and paragraph coherence. She's learned about the encomium paragraph in CW and worked with nouns in the theory section. She finished her final attempt at the first writing project and her first attempt at the second one. In literature, she completed Rawling's
The Yearling, wrote a book report, and began reading Doyle's
Lost World. She's up to the 7th lesson in Caesar's English 1.
Her Latin continues to be mostly a review of grammar with a few additions here and there. She completed her first unit reading and test and did well once she actually read and followed the directions.
In EG2, she has completed two more lessons which reviewed the remainder of last year's vocabulary and grammar topics.
Violet covered the Babylonian empire under Hammurabi, the Indus Valley, the importance of the Nile River in Egypt, and Egyptian heiroglyphs. She's read a combination of
Usborne's Encyclopedia of the Ancient World, a portion of
Babylonians by Landau,
The Indus Valley by Aronovsky, selections from
The Egyptians by Odjik, the beginning of
The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt by Payne, and
The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone. She completed two short outlines, brief paragraphs on the Indus Valley and the gift of the Nile, and longer essays on Hammurabi and hieroglyphs. Her mapwork included a map of Hammurabi's empire and a map of Egypt's major landforms.
In life science, Violet has completed through chapter 4 covering topics relating to cells over the past couple weeks. We caught up her lab work this weekend demonstrating osmosis with two sections of dialysis tubing filled with water or corn syrup that soaked in water for 30 minutes, learning how to use the microscope with prepared slides of onion skin and a leaf section as well as a slide we made of epithelial cells, and demonstrating turgor pressure by soaking two slices of potato in regular and salt water and comparing them after 30 minutes.
She completed two acrylic paintings for art that are shown in previous posts and covered violins, violas, cellos, and the double bass in music.
