Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Week 7

I'm so late posting week 7 that it is nearly time to post week 8!  Oh, well.  I've been busy, of course, with packing and getting ready to move.  It certainly makes for busy days.  So far, though, we've been able to keep almost our full schedule for school.

Language Arts

Mikaeala's grammar covered the grammatical information found in most dictionaries.  She began the third section of the book about phrases and has covered prepositional, appositive, and gerund phrases.  In vocabulary, she started a new lesson with another 25 stems.  She seems to like vocabulary this year and is doing well in it.  In poetry, she read in-depth analysis of "Afton Water" by Robert Burns and learned more about trochaic feet.  She finished her notes and fused outline for her third topic of her American Revolutionary figure report.  We sure are taking this one slow; it feels like it will never be finished.

Sam has continued to insist on doing two sentences a day with his grammar practice.  He does well on most of them, but occasionally comes across a sentence that really throws him.  He finished lesson 7 in vocabulary which covered five more stems.  In poetry, he has been learning about all kinds of meter.  He also finished his notes and fused outline for his report.

Math

Mikaela learned about multiplying with negative numbers.  She didn't have any trouble with it.

Samuel and I have been going over his first chapter in Art of Problem Solving's Pre-Algebra book.  He already worked on this chapter last week, but looking over his work, I could see that he was missing the point of some of it.  It's so different from what he is used to. I love this book so far and will have to find time to sit down and review it in detail on the blog.

History

This week's history topic was the rise of Napoleon.  The kids have also been working on a geography assignment I gave them to create an imaginary continent that includes a whole list of required landforms.  They have really been enjoying this assignment.  They put their first drafts down on typing paper; it will be transferred to poster board and finished later.


This is Mikaela's continent so far.


Sam has really been putting a lot into his map already.

Science

Mikaela finished a chapter on Mercury while Sam and I have been trudging through his chapter on light and telescopes.  We've spent way too much time on this chapter but it is so very full of detailed technical information about the electromagnetic spectrum, how it is measured, how telescopes work, different types of telescopes and what they are used for, the world's largest telescopes and how they are used, and so much more.  It has 28 sections in it; I can't wait to move on from this chapter.


Here's my white board after going through just one section of astronomy with Sam.

I opted not to do a TOPS astronomy lab this week.

The kids finished the atmosphere section of Jetstream and took the review quiz.

For geology, they rubbed granite rocks together to see the resulting topsoil and how the rocks looked at the site of the mechanical weathering.

Foreign Language

Somehow both kids managed to get through the week without doing all three sessions of Rosetta Stone.  I have them doing three half-hour sessions per week.  This week, Mikaela only did two, and Sam only did one.

Fine Arts

We completed a drawing of a wooden bucket from Draw Squad this week.  The hardest part, I think, was drawing the guidelines that determined the direction the top edge of the boards would go.


This is Mikaela's bucket.


Here is Sam's bucket.

We also took Friday off from school to go to Woodland Park Zoo.  We were blessed with some really good viewing.

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