Week 18 Upper:

GEOMETRY: Jessie completed the review sets at the end of chapter 8 covering transformations, scored her first perfect score on the chapter test, and began working on the midterm review sets this week.

GREAT BOOKS: This week's assignment was to pick a thesis, write an outline, and turn it into a five paragraph essay on Homer's Odyssey. We briefly discussed plot, character, and theme using Teaching the Classics; but I felt like I could keep the discussion brief since the Vandiver lectures that she listened to were excellent. She finished her rough draft, and I'll mark some changes for editing on Monday. The basic idea is there, but she needs to edit and add in some more detail and quotes to better make her point.

ENGLISH: I've decided that English as a subject was taking up too much time each day. For the next 6-8 weeks, she going to take a break from grammar and concentrate on finishing up CW Herodotus. This week's assignments were a mishmash of catch up work: a commonplace essay that hadn't been done, further developing a few paragraphs, and finishing out her final lessons from the week before break. It's not all done quite yet because she became sick on Wednesday, but we'll keep working on it over the weekend.

LATIN: She completed a quiz on chapter 24, completed the exercises in chapter 25 covering reflexive pronouns and possessive adjectives, and began working on the chapter reading. She also had a quiz on the present active and perfect active systems and reviewed the corresponding passive systems for next week.

SPANISH: Her Spanish covered vocabulary relating to months, seasons, and weather this week. She covered the conjugation of hacer and some of the idiomatic expressions for which it is used. She also covered some of idiomatic uses for tener, the conjugation of decir, and the use of decir plus que to introduce a clause. She received a high A on Friday's quiz.

HISTORY: She jumped back to cover lesson 10 in Foundations of Western Civilization about Greek culture and completed the corresponding section in Spielvogel taking notes and writing a paragraph answer to the focus question. She also read chapter 66 in Bauer's History of the Ancient World and chose Egyptian gods and religion for her first paper topic.

SCIENCE: Her assignment this week was to take notes on chapter 6 this week. She is currently finishing this up as I'm typing because her science falls on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. It was midweek when she became sick.

MUSIC APPRECIATION: She listened to two more Handel cds.

Violet's 7th Grade

MATH: Violet covered 5 more section in chapter 4 of NEM on decimals.

ENGLISH: She wrote her book report for The Fellowship of the Ring and began reading Age of the Fable by Bulfinch. She's not thrilled with it, so I may switch her to the Guerber myths if I can get it downloaded from project Gutenburg. She began the second Caesar's English book and passed her first vocabulary test. In R&S she worked with personal, demonstrative, and indefinite pronouns. She also completed a lesson on organizing notes for a paper. In CW, she spent the week analyzing one of Benjamin Franklin's articles for the Spectator.

LANGUAGES: In Latin, she passed her quizzes on chapters 13 and 14 and reviewed third declension adjectives in lesson 15. For Greek, we took the week to catch up on vocabulary and grammar memory work.

HISTORY: Violet covered the Greek battles against Darius and Xerxes at Marathon, Thermophylae, Salamis, and Plataea reading chapters 45-53 of Guerber's The Story of the Greeks. She wrote 2 paragraph summaries and a longer 3 paragraph one.

SCIENCE: Violet worked on chapter 14 in BJU Life Science this week. This is the last chapter in the first book. Yeah! Almost halfway there. I had planned to do some catch up labs, but with Henry sick I ended up sitting and snuggling with him instead. We'll try again next week.

FINE ARTS: Art is in Thursday's post. No music for Violet either because I forgot to check out the book.