This week had it's ups and downs. Monday was up. Tuesday was down. Wednesday was way up. Thursday was way down. Tomorrow we have a day planned that will keep us down, but make us feel up.
A World of Adventure. Have I said how much I love this study? We finished up our reading in Genesis on the life of Joseph. We have now moved onto the warnings against worshiping idols. That fits in perfectly with our studies in Ancient Egypt because worshiping other gods is all they did! We have been digging deep into our study of Ancient Egypt and will continue to dig deeper.
Language Arts. We started reading The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. With that book there are discussion questions each day, writing assignments and spelling and vocabulary words. The curriculum has actually taken a break from an actual spelling lesson, with us finishing up our ie/ei rules last week. But I decided to use the provided vocabulary words from each chapter of The Golden Goblet and have Dawson do spelling drills with those words (i.e. putting them in alphabetical order, using them in sentences.) And we will test over all of these words.
Social Studies. We have continued studying Ancient Egypt, talking about Pharoahs, craftsmen and the afterlife. We watched an afterlife documentary. And with our emphasis on deserts in Science, we did some desert mapping this week. We started a time line that we are actually going to post on our wall, wrapping around the top of our school room. We are using notecards and string. That way we can add events to it all year as we learn and have a good visual of it. We thought this would be more effective than putting it on paper in a binder somewhere. I'll have photos next week. We also read a bar graph today to obtain data about the types and numbers of craftsmen in The Golden Goblet.
Science. Our study on deserts is taking us into the topics of weather, evaporation and transpiration. We have had a few experiments this week. We determined different temperature changes of water based on the color of tin can, one painted black and one left in its shiny tin color. Our second one on evaporation has been "foiled" each day. The first day the dogs knocked over one of the jars of water and ate the foil off the top of it and spilled out all the water (that's not exactly the evaporation we were looking for). Yesterday it rained so our jar with no covering took on extra water instead of evaporating it like it was supposed to. We are starting over with Day 3. We'll check on our jars on Tuesday. Our last experiment was on transpiration and the difference between cactus plants and regular house plants and the amount of water they release through their leaves.
Pre-Algebra. This is our biggest and most difficult subject every day. We did find that Dawson does better if he can work out the problems on the white board instead of on paper. I did see him pick up on some concepts this week that he was struggling with. Some of it seemed to click. For me, Saxon Math is all about building on what you learn, and revisiting what you learned previously. I can already see the growth in his learning. He gets frustrated easily when he doesn't pick up a concept immediately, but I am wanting us to push through and see how things go before we just give up and choose another curriculum. I've always got Life of Fred in the back of my mind.
Fine Arts. On Monday Dawson and I made reed boats. (He wasn't at all embarrassed to be standing on the side of a busy road pulling long grasses.)
On Tuesday he attempted to make some pyramids with little success with the materials we had on hand, so the biggest lesson in that was how difficult building pyramids really is!
Yesterday we learned about the rules artists had to follow, in lines and color. We each drew a picture out of Ancient Egypt Drawing Book on Monday and then on Wednesday we used sand to color in our pictures. I did Nefertiti and Dawson did a scarab. (He likes the scarab, can you tell?)
At the beginning of the week I also did the Hieroglyphics Scavenger Hunt for him to receive his reward.
Typing/Spanish. Dawson did a typing lesson and a couple of pages out of his Spanish book. We also became privy to a free website for learning foreign languages called LiveMocha. He did a lesson from it, also. We are still having a hard time fitting these two things into our week with regularity, because the other subjects are so time-consuming. I am hoping that after Labor Day weekend and Dawson's annual weekend with his dad at his hometown's fall festival, that we will be able to settle into a more regular schedule and get these topics in one day a week each.
Today I was sick and in bed most of the day. We did all of our reading on my bed while I rested. Dawson received instruction from me, went off to do his work independently and then came back for me to review his work. He fixed me some lunch and took care of the dogs (when they weren't all piled on me on the bed!)
Tomorrow we have planned to lay on the couch and watch back-to-back Ancient Egypt documentaries that I posted about here. In between videos we are going to do some blogging, some sketching and some spelling testing. We are going to run into town and take Kyndal out to lunch and then I'm going to run to the school to get my weekly copies done (since I didn't go today from being sick.) Dawson will finish his day with some reading in The Journey, the second book in The Guardians of Ga'Hoole series.
And I will collapse.
A World of Adventure. Have I said how much I love this study? We finished up our reading in Genesis on the life of Joseph. We have now moved onto the warnings against worshiping idols. That fits in perfectly with our studies in Ancient Egypt because worshiping other gods is all they did! We have been digging deep into our study of Ancient Egypt and will continue to dig deeper.
Language Arts. We started reading The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. With that book there are discussion questions each day, writing assignments and spelling and vocabulary words. The curriculum has actually taken a break from an actual spelling lesson, with us finishing up our ie/ei rules last week. But I decided to use the provided vocabulary words from each chapter of The Golden Goblet and have Dawson do spelling drills with those words (i.e. putting them in alphabetical order, using them in sentences.) And we will test over all of these words.
Social Studies. We have continued studying Ancient Egypt, talking about Pharoahs, craftsmen and the afterlife. We watched an afterlife documentary. And with our emphasis on deserts in Science, we did some desert mapping this week. We started a time line that we are actually going to post on our wall, wrapping around the top of our school room. We are using notecards and string. That way we can add events to it all year as we learn and have a good visual of it. We thought this would be more effective than putting it on paper in a binder somewhere. I'll have photos next week. We also read a bar graph today to obtain data about the types and numbers of craftsmen in The Golden Goblet.
Science. Our study on deserts is taking us into the topics of weather, evaporation and transpiration. We have had a few experiments this week. We determined different temperature changes of water based on the color of tin can, one painted black and one left in its shiny tin color. Our second one on evaporation has been "foiled" each day. The first day the dogs knocked over one of the jars of water and ate the foil off the top of it and spilled out all the water (that's not exactly the evaporation we were looking for). Yesterday it rained so our jar with no covering took on extra water instead of evaporating it like it was supposed to. We are starting over with Day 3. We'll check on our jars on Tuesday. Our last experiment was on transpiration and the difference between cactus plants and regular house plants and the amount of water they release through their leaves.
Pre-Algebra. This is our biggest and most difficult subject every day. We did find that Dawson does better if he can work out the problems on the white board instead of on paper. I did see him pick up on some concepts this week that he was struggling with. Some of it seemed to click. For me, Saxon Math is all about building on what you learn, and revisiting what you learned previously. I can already see the growth in his learning. He gets frustrated easily when he doesn't pick up a concept immediately, but I am wanting us to push through and see how things go before we just give up and choose another curriculum. I've always got Life of Fred in the back of my mind.
Fine Arts. On Monday Dawson and I made reed boats. (He wasn't at all embarrassed to be standing on the side of a busy road pulling long grasses.)
On Tuesday he attempted to make some pyramids with little success with the materials we had on hand, so the biggest lesson in that was how difficult building pyramids really is!
Yesterday we learned about the rules artists had to follow, in lines and color. We each drew a picture out of Ancient Egypt Drawing Book on Monday and then on Wednesday we used sand to color in our pictures. I did Nefertiti and Dawson did a scarab. (He likes the scarab, can you tell?)
At the beginning of the week I also did the Hieroglyphics Scavenger Hunt for him to receive his reward.
Typing/Spanish. Dawson did a typing lesson and a couple of pages out of his Spanish book. We also became privy to a free website for learning foreign languages called LiveMocha. He did a lesson from it, also. We are still having a hard time fitting these two things into our week with regularity, because the other subjects are so time-consuming. I am hoping that after Labor Day weekend and Dawson's annual weekend with his dad at his hometown's fall festival, that we will be able to settle into a more regular schedule and get these topics in one day a week each.
Today I was sick and in bed most of the day. We did all of our reading on my bed while I rested. Dawson received instruction from me, went off to do his work independently and then came back for me to review his work. He fixed me some lunch and took care of the dogs (when they weren't all piled on me on the bed!)
Tomorrow we have planned to lay on the couch and watch back-to-back Ancient Egypt documentaries that I posted about here. In between videos we are going to do some blogging, some sketching and some spelling testing. We are going to run into town and take Kyndal out to lunch and then I'm going to run to the school to get my weekly copies done (since I didn't go today from being sick.) Dawson will finish his day with some reading in The Journey, the second book in The Guardians of Ga'Hoole series.
And I will collapse.
Your week looks pretty good despite the sick day. I'll be checking back in on your blogs to see how World of Adventure goes. I'm considering it for 9th Grade.
ReplyDeleteJanet W
http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/wdworkman/
We loved The Golden Goblet. Isn't Ancient Egypt cool? It looks like ya'll have a productive week in spite of being sick. Have a great week!
ReplyDelete