Week 15 Review -- January 19-23

Another great week is behind us. We have a little to finish up because we decided to save all of our science work for the weekend, so the 24th will be Super Science Saturday!
Here's the run down of what we did.

Everett
Grammar: Growing with Grammar lessons 2.4-2.7 were completed. He worked with plural nouns, irregular plural nouns and started working with possessive nouns.

Penmanship: Pages 46-51, his cursive is coming along nicely, although it will be a while yet before he's comfortable enough to use it for everyday assignments.

Spelling: He completed the second half of group 7, group 8 and half of group 9 this week. He's doing fairly well and is able to spell words that I thought would be difficult for him.

Math: Lessons 18-21 and Quiz 3 were completed. He was working on multiple step word problems and some basic multiplication.

Geography: Daily Geography week 15 covered reading a physical map of the United States.

Annika
Penmanship: Pages 46-51 completed in her usual perfectionist style.

Phonics: We started using Winterpromise's Adv. K phonics program, which may seem like moving a level backward, but it's turned out to be a good jumping off point. We've covered the first 3 weeks worth of lessons this week. It was a review of the letter sounds, but uses vertical phonics which is going ok with her. She's excited about next week when we add in spelling, making a picture dictionary and starting Explode the Code.

Math: CLE lessons 17-22 and the Lightunit 1 test were completed. She is still enjoying CLE math and did excellent on the test. She also enjoyed that she now does speed drills, which went really well.

Geography: Daily Geography week 15 covered reading a land and water map of Colorado.

BOTH:
Writing: Writing With Ease Level 1 week 15 which included excerpts from The Railway Children was completed.

History: This week we covered the Iroquois and read If you lived with the Iroquois. We have a few projects to finish up on Saturday because we were waiting for supplies to arrive.

Science: This week we have decided to have "Super Science Saturday" and complete all our science work on that day. We have started our human body unit and will did some reading and activities about the skeletal, muscular, and circulatory system. The projects are really fun and make science a real highlight of our schooling.

Art: We've decided to use the projects from our Native American studies as art time and will continue to do that for the next 4 weeks.

Here's some pictures from "Super Science Saturday"

Come back next week to check out our Week 16 review.

Week 14 Review -- January 12-16

It was a pretty good week here although we kind of puttered out at the end of the week because Annika got a cold and hasn't been sleeping well lately.

Here's the run down of what we did accomplish.

Everett
Grammar: Growing with Grammar lessons 2.1-2.3 were completed. This is the beginning of the "nouns" section. He worked with common and proper nouns, as well as compound nouns.

Penmanship: Pages 38-45, I believe he worked on the letters J, K and Y. He really enjoys this program and now looks forward to penmanship practice.

Spelling: We switched back to Spelling Power and after a rough start with Level C group 6 words he did fairly well. He completed all of group 6 and half of group 7.

Math: Teaching Textbooks has made a great change in math for us. He is able to do the lessons completely on his own, which frees me up to work with Annika and Lucas. Lessons 15-17 and Quiz 2 were completed. He especially enjoyed the lessons on Roman Numerals.

Geography: Daily Geography week 14 covered the Rocky mountain region. Although it is a simple program he does enjoy it and is making great strides in map reading.

Annika
Penmanship: Pages 38-45 completed in her usual perfectionist style.

Phonics: She's continuing to progress through Hooked on Phonics "Yellow box" although we'll be adding in Explode the Code and I also have Winterpromise's advance K on the way to see if that will help me be more consistent with her.

Math: CLE lessons 11-16 were completed. She really enjoys CLE math and I think it's going to be a great fit for her. The lessons are going fairly quickly as she's really now just cementing somethings that were a bit shaky for her, but the slow and steady pace of CLE is just what she needs.

BOTH:
Writing: Writing With Ease Level 1 week 14 was completed.

History:This week we covered the Inuit and read Polar Bears Past Bedtime. So far the study of Native Americans has been fun and interesting for them. I just hope it continues to be.

Science: R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey Life, Level 1 has been a lot of fun so far. This week we covered cells, and will conclude the week tomorrow (sat) by sketching the plant and animal cells we made out of jello and fruit.

Art:Nothing on the schedule for art this week.

Latin: Nothing on the schedule this week for Art.

Come back next week to check out our Week 15 review.

Week 13 Review -- January 5-9

Well it's now 2009 and we're back to school here at Fawkes Academy. For a first week back after a few weeks off it went really well. I think the kids and I were more than ready to get back to it, and we were all excited about some new curriculum and changes we made. We ended up changing math and science for both older kids and decided against changing grammar for Everett. He'll also change his spelling back next week.

Here's the run down of what we did accomplish. I've decided to only include pictures of the fun things this week although not all of them are completely finished so I'll update pictures as they are done this weekend.


Everett
Grammar: After some thought and reflection the last week of break I decided to keep Everett in Growing with Grammar instead of switching to Shurley English. After taking almost a month off of Grammar he covered the Chapter 1 Review about sentence vs. fragment, indirect and direct quotes and diagramming both simple and compound subjects and predicates. I was amazed at how much he had retained. He got 100% on the review. Next week we move on to nouns with Chapter 2


Penmanship: HWT contiues to work well for him and his cursive is coming along although we're still printing on all other assignments.


Spelling: Completed step 16 and we'll return to Spelling Power next week. He enjoys All about Spelling, but like Spelling Power more.


Math: This was our big change for Everett. We decided to cast Saxon math to the wayside becasue it was becoming more frustrating for him each day. We returned to Teaching Textbooks grade 5 and he's blazing through it. He even worked on it over holiday break because he enjoys it so much. He completed Lessons 1-14 as well as Quiz 1 over the past 2 weeks.


Geography: We returned to Daily Geography and he worked on reading a map of California focusing on all the differnt kinds of water features the state has.



Annika
Penmanship: As usual Annika excelled in penmanship. She has absolutely beautiful printing and takes great pride in it.


Phonics: Hooked on phonics is going well and we're about 1/3 of the way through the Yellow level. She does enjoy the program and we're going to start reading 10 minutes a night from past Hooked on Phonics readers to get more comfortable with reading.


Math: Well another major change for math as Rightstart turned out to be a bit too confusing for us traditionally math minded folks. After a bit more research we decided to try Christian Light Education's Sunrise math. She completed Lessons 1-10 in her first Lightunit (for those not familiar with CLE, the program is broken up into 10 workbooks called Lightunits to help the kids get a sense of accomplishment as the progress through each workbook) So far so good. I love the layout of the teacher's manual as well as how math facts are presented to her. She is even enjoying the flashcards as they don't give her 10 at a time to learn, they break it down into smaller chunks of 1-2 new facts a day. She enjoys the variety of problems and is having fun coloring the duck with the stop sign at the end of each lesson too. I also bought the calendar book from CLE and that is a huge hit. It's much more fun than Saxon's meeting book and at the end will help with graphing skills as well as calendar skills.


BOTH:
Writing: Copywork and narration covered The Saturdays

History:We have continued our Native American study and covered the Seminole tribe of the southeast this week. Next week we'll move to the extreme opposite side of the country to cover the Inuit of the Great White North.

Science: Our last big change has come in the area of science. After a rave filled start NOEO has fizzled and become boring. They wanted more hands on so I went to check out a curriculum I've had my eye on for a while. R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey (from pandia press) has always appealed to me but because they only had 2 areas (Life and Earth/space) I had always been a little worried about where we'd go next. Pandia press has announced that Chemistry level 1 will be out in March of this year and Physics level 1 will be out later in 2009 along with Biology level 2 and more in the works for years to come. I decided to get Life level 1 and it looks like a tons of fun. This week we did the first Unit which covered comparing living things to non-living things and observing the differences. I think the kids will really enjoy that each unit has 1-2 hands on experiments or activites. This week was a big hit and I'm sure next week will be loads of fun, it starts covering cells in which we'll get to make some cells out of fruit and jello.

Art: We are enjoying Artistic Pursuits but wanted to keep it simple this week so we're working on paper bag puppets with some kits I found at Walmart. Here's some pictures of the puppets as well as a picture of the finished Seminole headdresses.

Latin: Wow, I can't believe I almost forgot about this. The kids have been on me for over a year to start teaching them Latin. I've had Song School Latin on my shelf for about 8 months and we finally got it out this week. We complete chapter 1 and now everywhere we go the kids greet people with "Salve" and when we leave give a hearty "Vale" which is what the program introduces for hello and goodbye. They also learned the words for teacher and student. All in all it was a short lesson but lots of fun.

Well I think I've rambled on long enough, so tune in next week for the Week 14 review.