WEEKLY REVIEW

Our new composer this week was George Gershwin, most famous for his Rhapsody in Blue. We are going to hang out on Longfellow for a bit longer, even though the girls have pretty much memorized the last poem. We finished up a couple books this week, and started a little fun book about the periodic table. We will just read a bit of it each morning.

Big Girl started her word lists in SWR this week. All the words are words she knows so far, to get used to the marking system and rules.

Big Girl read The Talisman, by Sir Walter Scott.

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WEEKLY REVIEW

Not too much new this week. We did start memorizing The Arrow and the Song by Lonfellow. Also, in our study of Acts, I decided to just read straight through Acts first, so as not to break up the flow, then read the rest of the NT in chronological order.

Big Girl finished setting up her log for SWR. We will start the word lists this week.

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WEEKLY REVIEW

Back to school this week.  We started a new composer, Sergei Prokofiev, most famous for Peter and the Wolf.  We started reading Robin Hood for our Middle Ages history.  We all love it.  Big Girl read another version of it by Howard Pyle for literature, as well as a couple other smaller versions we have here.  She really likes comparing.  We also watched the old Erol Flynn Robin Hood on Netflix.  It was fun.

The paragraph writing book that Little Girl was doing was quickly getting very complicated, which makes sense since the cover says it is for up to grade 8.  So I have dropped that for now.  Not sure if I will resume some sort of writing exercise for her or not.  I said earlier that I didn't think she needed it, but I am not sure.  If I do, it will definitely be Beechick inspired, like copywork and dictation, along with writing things in a different tense, or from another point of view.  Nothing too complicated.  

I started Spell to Write and Read with Big Girl.  We haven't actually started the spelling lists yet, but she already knows most of the phonograms from when we did it before a long time ago. We did some pages in the log, and will finish those next week.  Then the following week, we will be ready to start the word lists.

We started our chronological reading through Acts, inserting letters where they fit into Acts, this week.  

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WEEKLY REVIEW

We took last week off, except for our read alouds, because so much has been going on.  We did start a couple new books for American History.  We are reading a biography of Andrew Carnegie, and I am reading a book called Toby Tyler, about a boy who runs away and joins the circus, to Little Girl.  Big Girl has read it before.  

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WEEKLY REVIEW

It's been very busy around here, so I am late getting this up.  But better late than never.  Our new artist is American artist, Norman Rockwell.  We really enjoy looking at his work.  Our composer is Igor Stravinsky.  As with most of the moderns, we just do not really care for him.  I'll be glad when we start back at the beginning again with the old ones like Bach and Beethoven.  The girls will too.  But we have a few more moderns to cover first, for exposure if nothing else.  

We are still working on memorizing The Spider and the Fly.  It is the longest we have done yet.  We will finish in another week or so.

For middle ages history, we started reading The Magna Charta.  

Our current country for geography is Wales.  Not a whole lot to study there, and the library didn't have any books on it.

Little Girl did her usual lessons in everything else this week, as did Big Girl.  Big Girl has decided she needs more teaching on punctuation than what is given in her Easy Grammar book. So, after she finishes it up, which will be soon, I think I will order her Jensen's Punctuation.  It looks very good, with plenty of practice.  She has also decided that she would like to do some spelling work.  We think she needs to learn the spelling rules and practice them so she can apply them to unfamiliar words.  So I am going to start Spell to Write and Read with her.  We will just start farther in the book than you do with a younger student.  Little Girl did it for about a year, and I can see her still applying what she learned.  She is more of a natural speller than her sister though.  I think the start in public school with their whole-word approach to reading and their "invented spelling" ruined Big Girl.

Big Girl should be finishing up Ivanhoe this week, then we will watch the movie.  One of the older versions, of course.

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