Friday, May 22, 2009

WEEKLY REVIEW


Nothing new with our fine arts this week.  We will be changing composer and artist next week.

For American history, we have been reading about the start of cities, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.  For Middle Ages, we read some spine books about Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland.  

Big Girl started Ivanhoe for literature this week.  She really likes it, and I am supposed to be reading it with her, but it puts me to sleep!  I might just read some Cliff's notes or something.  She also started her Lial's math.  So far, so good.  Just basic review at this point.  Her writing was about using adverbs and prepositional phrases.

Little Girl did all her usual lessons.  Her writing was about outlining paragraphs and using parallel construction.  She is actually doing better than I expected!  I am pleased.

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Saturday, May 16, 2009

WEEKLY REVIEW


This week we finished up some books and started some new ones.  We started reading My Side of the Mountain, just for fun.  It is a really good book.  We started listening to Maurice Ravel for our composer.  He is much better than Ives, though not as good as the old masters. :-)  I guess we just don't care for modern stuff.

Big Girl didn't do any math this week, as we were waiting for the Lial's BCM I had ordered.  It came yesterday, and I have planned out next weeks lessons.  She just was not enjoying the biology she has been doing, and would have preferred to skip to the later, more interesting chapters in the book.  So I decided to just let her read through this book, with no questions or anything, and give her a half credit for it and a half credit for the physical science book she read through last year.  After she finishes, we will find some topic she is interested in and do an in depth study on it.  She did daily exercises in her Wordsmith this week, and the final assignment of the week was to write a restaurant review.   She did her grammar and vocabulary and is finishing up the Spurgeon biography this weekend.

Little Girl is continuing working through her subjects, as usual.  We have been working on outlining paragraphs this week, and will continue until it is easier for her.  She is doing great in everything else.
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Saturday, May 9, 2009

WEEKLY REVIEW


Here is our week in chart form:

BOTH


BIBLE---Gospel harmony

POETRY---Mary Botham Howitt : The Spider and the Fly

ARTIST---Grant Wood

COMPOSER---Charles Ives

EXTRA READING---On the Banks of Plum Creek; My Side of the Mountain

U.S. HISTORY---Various books on the Statue of Liberty and Immigrants

MIDDLE AGES HISTORY---If All the Swords in England


BIG GIRL


KEY TO ALGEBRA---Book 4: P. 1-6

EASY GRAMMAR PLUS---8 pages

JENSEN'S VOCABULARY---1 lesson

LITERATURE---Charles Spurgeon

APOLOGIA BIOLOGY---Module 3: week 4

WORDSMITH---Week 3


LITTLE GIRL


MATH-U-SEE---Lesson 14

CLE LANGUAGE ARTS---LU 402: Lessons 13,14; LU 403: Lessons 1,2

SPELLING PLUS---Dictation list 43; List 44 words

PARAGRAPH WRITING---1 lesson

INDEPENDENT READING---Five Children and It; Abeka science 5; Vos story Bible; CLE reading story

TYPING---Practice


We are really enjoying Grant Wood's paintings, for the most part.  But we did not care for Charles Ives at all for our composer.  His music sounded pretty much like noise to us.  We will be moving on next week to a new one.  


I ordered Little Girl Paragraph Writing Made Easy, and we did the first lesson this week and started the second.  I think we will like this.  


Big Girl hit a snag in algebra again.  She got to the fourth book in Key To, and it just wasn't clicking.  She isn't making the connections she needs to in order to do algebra. So she looked at Lial's Basic College Math with me this morning, and said she liked the looks of it, and we ordered it for her.  I figure we can come back to algebra when she is about 16 or so, and more ready to tackle the kind of thinking needed to grasp algebra.  The Lial's will keep her basic math fresh meanwhile, and even looks to have some useful stuff she hasn't covered yet anywhere else.


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Saturday, May 2, 2009

WEEKLY REVIEW


This week, we continued our Gospel study for Bible.  Heading toward the end soon.  We also finished up with Benjamin Britten, and will be starting a new composer next week.  For poetry, I did find another poet to study - Mary Botham Howitt.  We are memorizing her famous poem, The Spider and the Fly.  Our new artist is Grant Wood, known for his famous painting, American Gothic.  We are enjoying his folksy paintings much more than the last artist's abstract stuff.  We just do not care for abstract.  

For world history, we continued If All the Swords in England.  We were reading Little Britches for U.S. history, but I got really tired of it, even though the girls really liked it.  Big Girl is going to finish it on her own, and if Little Girl wants to read it some day, she can.  It was ok, just too long and detailed to suit me, especially for reading out loud.  Also, I just want to move on.  So this coming week, we are going to move on to the Statue of Liberty.  I think we all got enough of the Paul Bunyan book, so we just watched a disney video about him on YouTube. 

We really enjoyed The Search for Delicious, and finished it up this week.  Big Girl and I also really liked Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, and finished it up this week as well.  For literature, we are going to read a Charles Spurgeon biography next.

Big Girl did her usual subjects, finishing up her 3rd book in the Key to Algebra series.  Her writing lessons this week focused on concrete and descriptive nouns.  

Little Girl did her usual lessons as well.  We did a few writing lessons in R&S, as planned, but I found out they are just not what she needs, and ordered her a paragraph writing workbook.  We will start that as soon as it comes.  She started reading Five Children and It, by Edith Nesbit this week, and she is really liking it and reading much more per day than I assigned.

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