Weekly review

I originally started this post last weekend but with me working, it never got done. So this review will be for the last two weeks.

Math: Not much new here again. I did buy Ellie a couple of wipe-off mats to help her with her math facts. I've been hearing horror stories of the Everyday Math that they are teaching in the public schools around here and I'm very thankful that my kids are not subjected to that. I feel for those kids who are being taught this as they are mostly confused as to how to do basic addition problems, etc and how math will continue to be a struggle for them as they grow older. For those of you who don't know what this is, it is basically relativism in the classroom--i.e. there are several different ways you can solve this math problem (most of which are painfully confusing) and you (generally speaking here) as the parent shouldn't inflict the way you learned how to add on your children. Sad, really.

English: Ellie finished up her chapter on diagramming compound sentences, identifying comma splices, and identifying run-on sentences. She has also learned about appositives (yeah, I didn't know what they were either) and the proper comma usage with them. Kara is memorizing a poem called "The Goops." She is also learning the being verbs. Part of her English curriculum is copywork. At one point this week she had a meltdown during copywork because she was convinced that I was making her write way too much. Afterall, she had already done her spelling and handwriting!!! Needless to say, it didn't get her out of her copywork that day. Ellie is also writing a paper about life on the Silk Road. This pertains to our current history topic. She's about done with it--I just have to go over it with her to make a few modifications and then she'll copy it for her final draft. Ellie is actually quite good at her writing and rarely needs to make modifications to her rough draft. She usually thinks quite a bit about each sentence before she writes it down. I'm pretty much the same way. In college I rarely edited a paper since I knew what I wanted to say the first time I wrote it.

Latin: Ellie is now working in Latina Christiana II.

Art: Last Thursday we went to a fundraiser at the Art Center. The fundraiser was for the local food bank and was called Empty Bowls. Basically, you pay a certain amount (either per person or per family) and get lunch (a bowl of soup and some bread) and you get to take home a bowl that was donated by someone. With the purchase of a family ticket, you only get to take home 2 bowls. However, there were several people around us who found out we didn't have enough tickets for each of us to have a bowl and gave us their tickets. We got 5 tickets so each kid could pick out a bowl and I picked one out. The kids were very thankful to the generous people around them. Dan went with Natalie and she picked out a really ugly bowl (according to Dan--I didn't see it) so he put it back and chose a different one for her. She said she liked that one too. I think she was just excited to pick out her own bowl so she just grabbed the first one she saw. :-) The museum was open to the public without an extra admission fee so we toured the current exhibits and went to a kids activity. The theme for the activity was installation art. Basically it is art you can walk through. The kids each made their own installation art--sort of like a diorama. There were some really weird exhibits there that I'm not sure were really art and the kids didn't really care for some of them either. One of the exhibits had a video with it that we watched. When it was over, Ellie asked me what in the world that was all about. I told her I didn't have any idea and to ask the museum docent who was standing outside the exhibit. She did and the lady told her it was for her to figure out. Ellie didn't really appreciate the answer. :-)

History: We've studied Kublai Khan, Ghengis Khan, Marco Polo, Joan of Arc and the Black Death.

Science: We learned about the life cycle of the frog and about the function of a lily pad and all of the life that lives under a lily pad. We also watched some videos on National Geographic's website about the life cycle of the frog and some of the dangers of frog life. The kids had a blast watching them.