Weekly Update - Week 17 (12/7-12/11/2009)

We had an excellent week this week. Here's how things went:

Math - still working on chapter 3 of Prealgebra. Rocket Boy is having some difficulty with keeping up with all of the little details in the longer problems, so we spent some time reviewing this week. We also started playing math games every day.  We played Knock Out from Muggins Math. There are several different versions/levels of this game and we choose to play the "face value" and "place value" versions. We had great fun trying to out strategize one another! I have ordered some additional games from Muggins Math that will give us more strategy practice as well as cover prealgebra concepts. The cost for the wood versions is quite high, so I ordered the laminate board versions and we will share the pawns between all of our games. The savings is significant. We are both looking forward to their arrival.

History - we have kept up pretty well with the schedule that I set out. We should be at the half-way point of the curriculum when we finish up before Christmas. Peter the Great was on deck this week and Rocket Boy has started to write a biographical paper on him. He has gotten a great start, but it still needs to be polished up.


Spelling - Apples 2 is continuing to provide a logical review for spelling rules, although I am sometimes inundated with the phrase "it's boring."  Nevertheless, he perseveres and is doing very well on the review.

Analytical Grammar - Rocket Boy is working on the last unit in season one! It covers compound subjects, compound verbs and compound sentences. This is the point at which sentence diagramming starts to look a little bit like a geometry project!

Bible - we are reading the Advent book Jotham's Journey this year. It is quite the adventure.


Science - lots of labs and activities this week! Here are pictures of Rocket Boy's mitosis models (the last two phases are incomplete, we'll work on it this week!):

The Prophase

The Metaphase

The Anaphase

The Telophase

 

Literature - finished up The Witch of Blackbird  Pond and checked out a really good site on the Salem witch trials.


Fine Arts - Rocket Boy is working on Canon in D  and some Christmas carols. There is one last lesson this week before the Christmas break.

One more week before Christmas break!!

Weekly Update - Week 11 (10/19-10/23)

We had a very good week this week! We managed to do a full schedule, including both history and science two days this week!

This week in pre-algebra we continued reviewing the order of operations w/all components. Next week we will re-test this chapter and then, I hope, move on to the next one. Spelling and grammar continue on course, as do guitar and drawing. We are reading Pollyanna out loud - sometimes its a little slow, but we're plodding through. In the New Testament, we have completed Titus.In history, we have finished reading about the Age of Reason and my son has started working on his biographical report of Issac Newton.

Wednesday was really different than most. Our speech club held a club wide speech/debate tournament. It was my son's first speech competition and he did very well. The judges did a wonderful job with his comments & he came away very encouraged.

I am excited about the opportunities participation in speech and debate through the NCFCA. Over the next few years, we should be able to work on honing my son's communications skills in preparation for his life and career. Here is the Mission Statement of the NCFCA:
The National Christian Forensics and Communications Association (NCFCA) believes that formal speech and debate can provide a means for home schooled students to learn and exercise analytical and oratorical skills, addressing life issues from a Biblical world view in a manner that glorifies God. To provide these opportunities to home schooled students, NCFCA shall facilitate qualifying tournaments throughout the country and the annual national tournament.

I have been watching various interpretive speeches on all week. Here's my favorite from this week, The Phantom Tollbooth:


Enjoy!

Weekly Update - Week 10 (10/13-10/16)

Maybe I am defining the word weekly a bit loosely. Hopefully I can get better at this!

I figured out this week that we are proceeding at roughly half speed in history and science. We are continuing our pattern of getting one or the other done, but not both.

The big news this week is that we actually did get some science work done! Activities, writing assignments and labs were completed and enjoyed! This week we covered cell theory, learned about the parts of the microscope and how to use it, looked at cork under the microscope just like Robert Hooke did back in 1663 when he first observed cells.

Pre-Algebra has been rough going - subtracting negative integers is a real sticking point in it's own right, but then combine them with long problems in which the order of operations is critical, then you can see a bit of what we've been working with. This week has been a review week for that reason. This was not a hard concept last year, but with the longer problems in Pre-Algebra, it is easier to become confused and to make simple errors in transcription if there are any interruptions or distractions to the work flow. Hoping this will smooth out in the coming days.

Grammar and spelling have been moving along nicely. Next week we will ramp up the language arts portion of the curriculum by beginning to write a biography on one of the people that has been encountered in the history studies. It will be interesting to see who is chosen - will it be Galileo Galeli, Carl Linnaeus or someone else?

Our Bible reading & prayer time continues daily, however we have stalled with discussions of the workbook we are using. My student is enrolled in a new elective class at church that covers theology, so that should complement our home study of theology well. I am hoping we can get back on track with this over the next few weeks. We read 1 Timothy this week.

Thinking forward:
I will have to assess where we are going to go with the remainder of the year. We will finish up Ch. 2 this week. Today I took the time to plan out the next chapter on cell processes and energy. I have 54 school days worth of plans for that one chapter alone. At this rate,we will not fully complete the material I wanted to cover during the year. I had already dropped the ecology chapters because we had covered that thoroughly during the past two years. I am committed to finishing the first unit in the book (7 chapters) because it includes basic information on Biology. My son had been looking forward to unit 3 on Human Biology and Health (which follows neatly after the end of unit 1, which includes an introduction to genetics. The unit in question is Unit 2 which covers living things - a chapter on viruses, bacteria, protists and fungi, a chapter on plants and then 5 chapters on various animals.

Towards that end, I read a fabulous book this week: Nurturing Inquiry by Charles R. Pearce. I picked up the book recommendation on The Well Trained Mind forums. It is an excellent description of using inquiry to teach science. I have been a bit puzzled by the recent descriptions of "science as inquiry" that I have seen here and there and this book proved to be an excellent primer on the concept. I think we will be making some changes in the weeks to come!