Friday- Homeschool Week in Review for Duncan

Language Arts
Duncan participated in Teatime Tuesday Poetry where we read A Calendar by Sara Coleridge. He also began memorizing Christina Rossetti. We are starting with this one:

There’s snow on the fields,
And cold in the cottage,
While I sit in the chimney nook
Supping hot pottage.

My clothes are soft and warm,
Fold upon fold,
But I’m so sorry for the poor
Out in the cold.

He read In Good Hands: Behind the Scenes at a Center for Orphaned and Injured Birds by Stephan R. Swinburne from Calvert Grade 3 Discoveries in Reading.

I read aloud pp. 34-36 from Milo Winter’s Aesop for Children, East of the Sun and West of the Moon from Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book, The Beginning of Armadillos from Just So Stories, and chapter 1 The Sword and the Stone from Merlin and the Making of a King retold by Margaret Hodges.

Duncan built a simple castle from the Klutz Card Castle Kit.


Our Thursday read-aloud book was Owl Moon. Together we did this great painting of a great horned owl in flight. The background is real easy- Duncan just painted blue and a little purple crayola paint with a giant brush. I painted the owl’s body and the wings are Duncan’s handprints.


Duncan played a little in his beginning cursive book, did Wordly Wise Book 2 Lesson 9, completed Easy Grammar 3 pp.60-64, Plaid Phonics C pp.67-72, and began copying a poem that teaches the names of the Presidents through Wilson.

Math
He completed Key to Fractions Book 4 pp.1-8 and Saxon 65 lessons 48-52.

Science
In science we learned about plate tectonics. He memorized the seven major plates as listed in Living Memory. We read about Alfred Wegener, continental drift and plate tectonics in Lyrical Earth Science and DK Eyewitness Earth.

Duncan also watched a bunch of science videos fromthe library: Magic School Bus Catches a Wave which includes three episodes (Wet All Over, Rocks and Rolls, and Ups and Downs), The Magic School Bus Gets Planted, and Eyewitness Bird.

Through Duncan's reader- In Good Hands, our Thursday read-aloud Owl Moon, our owl art project, Eyewitness Bird, and a library book- Owls by Tom Warhol, we have talked quite a bit about birds particularly raptors and specifically owls!

History and Geography
Duncan again played with The Seven Continents of the World Jigsaw Book.

We began studying about Vikings. We looked at Vikings in The Usborne Internet-Linked History Encyclopedia and chapter 14 of SOTW2. We also read chapters 1-4 from The Real Vikings by Gilda Berger.

Duncan did a Viking word search that I found online and we assembled the Viking boat from the SOTW2 activity guide. Honestly, this was a mommy project, uggh! Duncan did the head and tail. I did the boat and all the assembly.


Arts
Duncan went to a violin lesson on Tuesday and practiced about 30 minutes on Thursday and today. We ran out of time on Monday before I left for work and Wednesday I totally flaked.

We began looking at Masaccio in The Annotated Mona Lisa and Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting.

We began listening to the music of Hildegard von Bingen. She was a nun in the middle ages. We tried to imagine Giotto listening to this type of music while he painted the crucifixion.

Since we had snow yesterday and we already had the paints out for our owl painting Duncan painted some snow pictures.

This one is Prussian blue water color brushed onto wet water color paper then while still wet sprinkled with Kosher salt. This is so simple that it is fun to do even with preschoolers.


The salt crystals absorb some of the paint. After the paint is dry brush off the salt and it looks sort of like little snow flakes falling.


This is a splatter painting mimicking Frost by Howard Hodgkin except Duncan's is more of a blizzard. First, Duncan slapped on Prussian blue water color every which way. Then, after the water color dried he splattered on white acrylic paint. Next, he did a blue acrylic border. Finally, on the right side after smearing the blue acrylic back and forth he dipped the still blue tip into some white and smeared it along the edge.