2013-2014 Week 4

This week was a good but short week, the typical "life happens" things came up, but we still managed to get about 3.5 days in.  

Everett did an excellent job on Grammar this week speeding through unit 3 on prepositions and prepositional phrases, those pronouns are still a thorn in his side, but he's getting there.  He completed a spelling test which means he only has about 7 or 8 steps left in this book and then it's on to book 5.  He typed up the edited final draft of his mini report on Music, Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, and completed his first microscope experiment for Unit 1 of biology.  He was using our new binocular scope and didn't care for it at all, so we decided to return it and bought a monocular one from Amazon that is perfect.  He also completed a few gap fillers in math, with reviews on the area of a trapezoid, area of a circle and circumference.  

Annika started Unit 3 in her Grammar book which covers pronouns, which are proving to be just as tough for her.  She completed lesson 8 in Barton reading and spelling level 3, wrote up a keyword outline on Oysters, completed 3 lessons in Math U See Gamma on multiplying by 6 as well as by 4.  In science she learned about how to use a microscope and also disliked the binocular scope.  She redid the lesson once we got the monocular scope and had much more fun.  She also enjoyed her biweekly art class where she continued working on a gift for her Uncle Tommy.  

Lucas had a good week, he completed 2 steps in All About Reading 2, which including reading a story about the Bantam Spy Club (which he read twice) he continues to impress me with how quickly he's catching on to reading.  He completed a lesson in All About Spelling 1, which included his first spelling test.  He did great, and his printing is really coming along as well.  He worked on learning to write cursive Ds and connecting them to As, completed lesson 10 in Math U See Alpha, as well as the Unit 1 test.  He was super excited as he got a 100% on his unit test in math and on his spelling test. 

We also started an artist unit on Piet Mondrian, and the kids learned about how he used simple primary colors, rectangles and squares of color, as well as vertical and horizontal lines to make pieces that can give you a sense of certain types of music.  They did there own simple drawings to learn the technique and next week will make their own version of a Mondrian.   In science he learned what a physicist is and worked with the categorizing items as living or non-living.  


We started our new history program from Sonlight Curriculum.  We are now using Core G: In Depth World History Part 1.  We read a chapter from The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child: Volume 1: Ancient Times: and started reading The Golden Goblet and Mara: Daughter of the Nile.  The kids really seem to be enjoying the books and look forward to hearing more and working on maps and timelines next week.