Week 18 LG: Homer, the Olympics, and Giraffes

Both boys were sick for part of the week, but they still managed to complete all of their scheduled school work. I made sure that I worked twice each day with Henry, which he was very excited about. Overall they had a great week despite being sick.

Benny's 4th Grade

BIBLE: Benny has been steadily reading one story per day from the Vos Bible book although I haven't been including it in the weekly reports. This week he read about Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.

MATH: Benny finished up his IP section on area and perimeter and completed the final review exercises in his 4A textbook and workbook this week. In CWP 4, he was completing problems involving angles.

LOGIC: His BTS mostly involved description of overlapping figures. He also completed another Mind Benders puzzle and an advanced Rush Hour card.

ENGLISH: He wrapped up the final exercises of chapter 5 in R&S covering verb pairs like lay/lie, set/sit, and can/may and also completed the chapter test on Friday. He completed the 16th lesson in SWO E covering prefixes like fore- or pre- and began the 17th lesson. In literature, he finished the remaining 2 chapters of the 4th Odyssey book by Osbourne and read all of the 5th book. His CW analyzed the fable "The Lark and Her Young Ones". Together, we read the final chapters of Colum's The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles.

LATIN: Latin grammar covered the imperfect endings of verbs for chapter 17. Next week we'll finally be adding in the first Latin history reader as well.

HISTORY: We covered chapter 20 in SOTW reading about Homer and the Olympics, but skipped reading the Odysseus story found in the chapter since he's already covered it in literature. In addition to the corresponding mapwork, we also read part of In Search of Troy by Ventura and all of I Wonder Why the Greeks Build Temples and Other Things by MacDonald.

SCIENCE: In addition to giraffes (whose poor babies, we found out start life with a 6 foot fall onto their head), we read about Okapi and and overview of family Suidae.

ART: His bird in a cage watercolor is in Thursday's post. No music this week. I forgot to check the books out on Saturday.

Henry's K

I wanted more structure to Henry's time for the remainder of the year, and we are off to a good start. In math, we reviewed counting by 1s and 10s and he actually counted correctly by 5s for the first time. We also began doing some pages in Miquon Orange matching rods to the number of objects in a square, working on number identification, and even a bit of number writing. His BTS Primary is still working with patterns, and he's much happier completing those pages without the various blocks.

In the language arts area, Henry and I slowly worked our way through 2 pages of Phonics Pathways and also started the first Explode the Code book. We covered the pretest and the first 4 pages on the short a sound. Most of it was done orally, but I did have him write a few a's as well. For our read aloud, we picked back up with Warner's Surprise Island. I also drew writing lines on his draw erase board, and he practiced writing the letters A, a, B, b, C, c, D, and d.

Henry's also listening to Bible stories from Egermeier's Bible Story book. This week we read about Samson and Ruth. I'm counting this as both Bible and history although he does sometimes listen in with Benny for SOTW 1. I also dug out an old workbook on animals to read to him. The animals are grouped by region and starts appropriately enough with the Arctic and Antarctic. We read about caribou, lemmings, ermines, musk ox, and orcas this week. I picked a couple of questions from below the text to ask him about (giving him multiple choice when needed). He also made a paper bag reindeer. Our bag was white, so he painted it brown. We cut his hand prints out of light brown cardstock (since we were out of construction paper) and used them for antlers. Then we added paper eyes and a nose. He also did a bit of Kumon each day.