Friday- Week in Review

Duncan is my 2nd grader.
Mei is my friend’s 5th grader.

Happy Halloween!

This week for memory work we continued to work on the witches’ chant from Macbeth. Next week we will add a new poem, but keep this one around. Now, if I can just find that list of poems I wanted them to memorize. Oh, also, Mei doesn’t have a black eye. She has eczema.

Our science and history memory work.
How many bones are in the skeleton of an adult?
An adult human skeleton has 206 bones.

Tell me about Constantine.
In 313A.D., Byzantine Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity.

Duncan's memory work for math and LA.
List some U.S. Customary units of length.
12 in = 1 ft
3 ft = 1 yd
5280 ft = 1 mi
1760 yd = 1 mi

Tell me about a verb phrase.
When a group of words is used as a verb, it is called a verb phrase. However, we refer to the whole verb phrase as the verb.

List the helping verbs.
am / is / are / was / were
be / being / been
do / does / did
has / have / had
may / might / must
can / could
shall / should
will / would

Mei’s memory work for math and LA.
skip count by 6's and by 7's
6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 54, 60, 66, 72
7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, 63, 70, 77, 84

Tell me about a prepositional phrase.
A prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and ends with its object. In a sentence a prepositional phrase acts as either an adjective or an adverb.

Language Arts
In poetry we continued with MCT’s The Music of the Hemispheres and reading from The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. Duncan and Mei are enjoying Sentence Island. Duncan and I began reading Arabel’s Raven and he also began reading Four Little Blossoms at Brookside Farm on my new Kindle. This book is suggested on the Old Fashioned Education website. At my house Mei read Macbeth in Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, a couple of fables from Why Snails Have Shells, and some more in Ballet Shoes. They both did some handwriting and some grammar (Mei- Winston Grammar, Duncan- Practice Island). Mei has created some fabulous characters for Nanowrimo which starts Monday. Eek!

Mei's main character

Math
Duncan has completed through lesson 80 in Saxon 76 and Mei has completed through lesson 43 in Saxon 65. Duncan is working in Key to Alg book1 and Mei is working in a Kumon multiplication workbook.

History
Moving on to history, Duncan and Mei covered Chapter 17 of Gombrich’s A Little History. We also read a couple of pages in Kingfisher.

Science
In science we began Great Science Adventures- Human Body! We discussed the skeleton. They watched the Eyewitness Skeleton video, looked over the skeleton section in DK’s The Human Body Book, and started a cool lapbook appropriate for Halloween time.

Duncan's left. Mei's right.

Inside Duncan's left flap.

Inside Mei's skeleton mini-book.

Other Stuff
They boogied through some Spanish in their workbooks. On the other hand Duncan didn’t even open Song School Latin. Good grief, I have fallen off the Latin wagon.

Duncan and Mei are really enjoying their Friday Arts Alive! classes. Duncan has also been going to a new violin teacher the past 4 weeks and that has really been going very well. The new teacher is Suzuki trained for books 1-3. I personally can't tell you what is different about the lessons, but I can hear the difference in Duncan's violin playing.