Week in Review- Duncan (wk4 of 36)

Duncan is my 8yo. Here is his fourth week of third grade:

Time4Learning
On Time4Learning Duncan completed at least one activity each day in Language Arts, Language Arts Extensions, Math, Science, and Social Studies. Here is a breakdown of how much time (hours: minutes: seconds) he ended up spending on T4L this week:

LA and LA extensions, combined- 2:22:06 (Verbs, Adjectives, Thinking Skills & Comprehension)
Math- 0:47:11 (Addition, Subtraction, and Multiples)
Science- 0:54:34 (Physical Properties, Magnetism, and Relationships between the Sun/ Earth/ Moon)
Social Studies- 0:57:47 (Inuit, Geographic Tools)

So, 5:01:38 is the total time that Duncan spent doing the computer portion of T4L this week.

Math
Duncan barely looked at Foerster’s Algebra this week although he did finish section 2-8. We actually put this on the backburner this week so he could spend more time on Khan Academy. This week he worked an average of 26 minutes per day at Khan Academy. Duncan finally received proficiency in Units and received his Artisan Pre-Algebraist Moon Badge! We haven’t worked much with measurement. Consequently, he had never worked with problems that say things like: An alien rocketship is traveling at a speed of 0.023 miles per second. At this speed, how many inches will it travel in 1 hour? Round to the nearest thousandth. Not having completed measurement problems previously made that units exercise a real bugger! He was very determined to watch the videos and learn how to do those problems. That silly little moon icon motivated Duncan to work harder than I could have... even bribing him with real money. I began requesting that he look at least one exercise with the orange review icon before beginning to work on exercises where he hasn't yet received proficiency. He also spent between 20 and 30 minutes each day doing Kumon math.

Language Arts
In language arts he worked on word list 61 from Spelling Plus and finished pages 15-18 in Spectrum Phonics and Word Study Grade 5. This week we narrated and rewrote the paragraph from the Key Word Outline about vulture bees. We also did a Key Word Outline of The Fox and the Hare. Duncan began studying Essentials of the English Language in preparation for Classical Conversations- Essentials. He copied the 112 Different Types of Sentences Chart and we came up with sentences of our own. He read pp.39-85 (eight stories) in The Beginner’s Bible. On Wednesday he started The Sign of the Beaver and finished chapters 1-9. He also read a couple of poems from Poetry for Young People: Walt Whitman.

History
In history Duncan read chapter 4- Africans in America in Land of Liberty and The New Americans by Maestro. We also watched the DVD Colonial Life: Settling the New World from Schlessinger Media. (Obviously, some of his literature is also tied to his history.)

Science
In addition to T4L, this week Duncan watched The Way Things Work- Springs (Yes, this DVD series goes along with the book The Way Things Work by David Macaulay.) and Disney’s Oceans.

Other Stuff
He did practice violin more than last week, but not daily. In preparation for Classical Conversations- Foundations that will be starting the week after Labor Day, we headed over to youtube and watched the first three weeks of the Lake Norman timeline song with hand motions.

Duncan in CC the end of last year.