Weekly update

I started this post last week but with working and sleeping I never got around to finishing it so this will be for the last two weeks.

Here is the summary of what we did these past two weeks:

Math: Ellie and Kara are continuing to work through their mathbooks. I've since gotten Kara some reusable math fact practice placemats and she is working on those for addition at this point.

English: Ellie is working on identifying past participles. It hasn't been too difficult for her yet. I think one of the reasons English hasn't been a problem for her is that we (Dan and I) are constantly correcting our kids' grammar in everyday conversations. Ellie will even correct me when I say something incorrectly. One of the reasons for this is that one of my majors in college was English and my sister is incredibly anal about using -ly endings appropriately so I think that it has rubbed off on me too. Kara is learning about helping verbs. Darin is reading and is incredibly cute when doing so. And he LOVES to do schoolwork. He still begs to do more and is quite sad when I tell him it is time to put it away. He does his little happy dance whenever it is time for reading.

Ellie took her chapter four test and will start chapter five next week.

Latin: Ellie continues with LCII. She is still doing review from LCI and will start new content next week. This week she had a friend over (from Schaeffer) and they were talking about Latin. Her friend loves Latin and will began extra Latin lessons this week from her Latin teacher and Ellie was commenting how she didn't like Latin. It was kind of funny to hear their different points of view. Ellie says she doesn't really mind the memorization of the Latin words and forms but she doesn't like the application part--you know, the part where she actually has to think.

History: Last week we studied Christopher Columbus. Ellie wrote a one page compare/contrast paper about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Kara wrote a paragraph about Christopher Columbus. This week Ellie continued to learn about different explorers. She's not been happy about the volume of schoolwork this week so we've been working on not getting overwhelmed with the amount of work, but instead just plugging away at it so that it gets done, little by little. We also read about latitude, longitude and how to read a map.

Science: We read another couple pages in our One Small Square book about ponds. The kids learned about how the male sunfish is the one that protects the eggs at the bottom of the pond. He fans the water over the eggs to keep them clean and to deliver oxygen to them. They also learned that lily stems have air spaces in them to help them stay up in the water.

Art: We learned three more elements of design (we learned three last week). We then looked at different works of art and described them using the six elements of design. We also learned about the five principles of design.