Weekly Wrap-Up: Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

Hello Fellow Homeschoolers! It's time for the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Because it's "Busch Gardens Season" for us, we crammed 5 days of work into 4. We hit the coasters on Friday.

Things are winding down for the year. Handwriting as been done for a while and we are finished with Spelling Power for the year. We have about 4/5 more weeks left of First Language Lessons , Writing With Ease, and math. That will leave us with just our Core 4 reading and science for another 4 weeks. That will be easy, peasy because our Sonlight reading is our favorite part of school.

Here are some of the highlights of our week.

Math

Mackenzie learned multiple digit multiplication this week. And boy did she LOVE it! She said, "It's fun, easy, and awesome!" She picked it up right away so she was able to skip the extra practice pages. Except that she WANTED to do the extra pages. LOL

Social Studies

We are still reading The Lewis and Clark Expedition and working on our Lewis and Clark lapbook. It's been fascinating reading about all the places and animals they discovered. How cool to be able to name places after your family and friends. We also made a discovery of our own while reading the book. In the book, Lewis' dog is referred to as Scannon. In our lapbook materials, Seaman. We were wondering what's up so we did a little research of our own and learned that the dog's true name was Seaman. Apparently the journals, understandably, were a bit blurry and they couldn't quite read the name. The error was discovered in 1916, when a researched noticed in Lewis had named a creek after his dog, "Seaman's Creek." So with a little more double checking it was learned that the dog's name was indeed Seaman.

We are also learning how the Morgan breed of horses was started in Justin Morgan Had a Horse. It's been a really good book so far, funny and exciting. And it's a true story. If you're a horse-lover should should check it out.

Mackenzie read Meet Thomas Jefferson as her reader this week. She's really been enjoying reading biographies this year and this one was no exception. She finished it in 3 days.

Science

This week we continued to study flying things in our reading and circuits for our experiments.

We also had some Painted Lady Butterflies and ladybugs that we were bug-sitting for friends who had to leave town. Sadly, the butterflies did not emerge as we had hoped. Out of the 5, only two hatched from the chrysilis and both had damaged wings. Poor butterflies.

The first one's wings were the worst. He couldn't fly at all.

The second one was a little better off. If could fly down but it couldn't lift itself off the ground.

The lady bugs did great. They look nothing like lady bugs when they start. At first we weren't sure that they'd ever look like ladybugs. LOL But they did.

I only managed to get blurry ladybug pictures. I need a better lens for stuff like that I guess.

We're also "sitting" a praying mantis. Nothing to report there yet. LOL

Be sure to head over to Kris' and see what everyone else is learning.