Weekly School Summary - Canada (October 10-14)

K*nex Food Chain

This week flew by! I had exterior painting to do so on Monday and Tuesday while the weather was nice, the younglings did their work with Mom in-between coats of paint! I figured if the trim, shutters, and garage looked so nice, I should have Bass completely remove the front screen door so I could paint it and its hardware too. I also had a scrapbook day planned with friends for Saturday so I needed to get my projects together for that, and I decided that our iTunes was a mess which ended up with me taking CDs in a huge storage tub and CDs from all over the house and car and spreading them all over the family room. I think I had too many plates spinning this week but we managed.

School-wise here's what we did:
Math: Almost the same as usual. They each did 5 lessons this week to adjust the schedule for next week's mini fall break and trip to the Adirondacks.

Reading and Language Arts: Soprano continued with a stuffed paper bear activity, wordsearch, and evaluation for Ira Sleeps Over (reading from 'Across the Centuries.') We had a couple of corrections on her already completed pages in her Phonics book, and we are making good progress on using proper capitalization in her Rod and Staff English.
I sold her old CLE curriculum on eBay already (Thank You, Lord!) and am now just waiting for her new spelling book to arrive.

J's stuffed bear project for "Ira Sleeps Over"

Since we're waiting on Tenor's new Rod and Staff English and Spelling to arrive, we continued with 'A Reason for Handwriting C' and 'Writing with Ease' this week. We also started his first reading selection from 'Across the Centuries C Level 1.' We jumped into reading the first few chapters of "A Lion, A Witch, and A Wardrobe" with some vocab word study, worksheets, and an evaluation on chapters 1 & 2.
Writing with Ease tanked on Day 3 though. *sigh*
I had 2 volumes of Writing Strands on-hand from a yard sale lot that Bass bought this summer. So we're going to try that instead. We doubled up lessons on Thursday and Friday and finished week 1. Tenor seemed to like it much better than the narration/dictation method of Writing with Ease. We'll see....

Electives:
Typer Island for their typing instruction and continuing with SOS Elementary Spanish.


They did another health worksheet about germs, a PA History sheet about our state seal, and we talked about our Community Helpers: Farmers and the important role they play in our lives.

Phys Ed.: More bike and scooter riding. Even after a soaking downpour on Wednesday. Although they came in quite wet and muddy.

Bible: This week included:
Reading about Garifuna (a people group in Central America)
Reading Matthew 5:11-26
Memorizing Matthew 5:11
Reading about William and Catherine Booth (founders of the Salvation Army)

Geography: We entered Canada. I remember visiting New Brunswick pre-9/11 and not needing a passport. Now you do and of course, we used our passports for MFW. Discussion about people and places of Canada and its flag. We played the geography game again eating up our stash of MandMs and Skittles. I have a bag of candy corn for next week.

Tenor's pages from World Geography this week were 'Languages of North America' and 'Religions of North America.' They also did their vocabulary cards this week (bay and cape.)

Science: This week we started talking about food chains. Tenor loved the book "Poop Eaters" that I found at the library. Hardly surprising for a 9 year old boy. They both enjoyed reading "Who Eats What?" and rather than drawing food chains on Tuesday, they proudly showed me a food chain they made using K*nex.
Soprano finished the Reptile sheets from The Complete Book of Animals.

Turtle eats fish (not sure about the accuracy of that), fish eats coral

Fox eats turtle (to left), rabbit (to right), and cat (above); Cat eats mouse; Mouse and Rabbit eat grass

Other MFW: Wee sing: Going Over the Sea. (Complete with marching around the family room and silly motions. Soprano might just be a future choreographer.)
We attempted the Inuit soap carving for our art project. It flaked. LOL Tenor eventually "carved" a shark tooth out the whole bar of Ivory. It's no loss though since I use shredded Ivory to make our laundry soap. (Plus I think we need some for week 14.)
I respectfully ask that you not pin pictures of my children to Pinterest. Thank you!

Tenor's small boat on the left and shark tooth on the bottom right.

With all the other projects that I had going on this week, I didn't add too much extra to the schedule. We watched a couple of DVDs from the library about Families in Canada and Ecosystems (which had a section about food chains,) and they blazed through a bunch of book basket books.

We had exciting news at the end of the week that added a little extra to our schedule too. My brother and his wife had their first baby! A sweet 8lb 14oz, 22" girl with a head of dark hair and the longest toes I have ever seen. She's adorable, and we got to go see them in the hospital and rejoice with them over the arrival of this precious little one!

My sweet niece, Elena!

Next week will be a 3-day week as we head up to the ADKs for a mini trip!


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