Friday- Homeschool Week in Review for Duncan

DUNCAN- 1st grade
Well, with Mr. Duncan I’ll just do a week in review and tell you what we managed to accomplish this week.

Language Arts
Duncan continued to work on some Emily Dickinson poems. He participated in Teatime Tuesday Poetry and talked about haiku. He made a copybook and sewed in the pages like the one we saw at the TN Ag Center that was used at the turn of the century. In his copybook he wrote out the first stanza of "Nobody" by Emily Dickinson. He did some Kumon reading packs and Thursday went to the Kumon center. We also read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day together.

He actually does have more workbook type stuff that he didn't do this week. With Thanksgiving I doubt that we will get around to any more language arts next week.

Math
On Tuesday afternoon he went to the math tutor and on Thursday afternoon he went to Kumon. He did some Kumon pages at home and some pages in Key to Fractions Book 2. He wrote some measurement conversions in his copybook. Due to the amount of driving that we have been doing, right now the number of feet in a mile is really interesting to him.

He actually does have a textbook that he didn't do this week. With Thanksgiving I doubt that we will get around to any more math next week.

Science
We talked about rock classes- Igneous, Sedimentary, and Metamorphic. We used the list from Living Memory by Andrew A. Campbell. He looked at the different types of rock in Grayson’s rock collections and read about them in DK Eyewitness Earth and DK Eyewitness Rocks & Minerals. He watched a couple of Magic School Bus videos (Busasaurus and Taking Flight) from the library. This led to looking books and talking about dinosaurs, but sparked no interest in flight.

History and Geography
This year Duncan is using a book called The Seven Continents of the World Jigsaw Book. The goal is that by the end of the year he can locate the seven continents on a globe and a number of countries in them. This week we looked at the continent of Australia, because in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Alexander says repeatedly that he is going to move to Australia. This map also includes Oceania, so we talked about Tasmania and New Zealand. This led to us going down a rabbit trail following Tasmanian Devils.

Duncan also learned about Charlemagne this week. We read about Charlemagne in The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History and in my old, beat-up Kingfisher History Encyclopedia.

Foreign Language
Duncan is using Rosetta Stone Farsi and sat on it twice this week for 15 minutes. Thursday night he talked to his grandparents, Aziz and Baba Haji, in Iran.

He also watched Kids Love Spanish- Volume 3: Family a couple of times which led to him calling me ma-ma like the children in the video.

Arts
Duncan went to his violin lesson on Tuesday and practiced about 30 minutes a day except on Thursday when we ran out of time. At his lesson he learned Jingle Bells!

This week we began looking at Giotto. We looked at Getting to Know the World’s Great Artists- Giotto and began reading it. I plan to continue looking at Giotto until we break for Christmas.

Today we went to see a play based on Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.