Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy Friday!!

I am happy to report that our third week of school was another success.  We accomplished everything I planned, including art, and spent a day at Water Country USA with friends.

Math

Mackenzie breezed through dividing by tens this week.  It’s been good to see that she’s been remembering all of her multiplication facts from last year too. 

Social Studies

We started reading William Wilberforce this week.  One might wonder why we are reading about a British Prime Minister while studying American history.  I’m thinking that it’s probably because Wilberforce was huge part of ending the slave trade over in England.  I’m sure that it impacted the goings-on over here.  And it’s a great read on how God can use one man to do great things.

Mackenzie finished By the Great Horn Spoon and loved it so much that she wanted to write a little report on it.  Who does that? LOL

Of course it should be known that book reports here are not what they were when I was in school.  No long, hand-numbing recount of the entire book.  We use How to Report on Books which is comprised of a lot of fun and creative forms to make report writing less boring and more interesting.

She never was able to decide what she liked best about it. “The touching ending” or “it made me laugh.”

She has since started Sing Down the Moon. It must be pretty good because today while she was reading it she was gasping and muttering things like “I can’t believe it.”  It’s about a Navajo girl and the many things she has to overcome in her life.

Moccasin Trail continues to be our read aloud.  It also continues to be fabulous.

Science

In our Zoology 1 studies we focused on what makes a bird a bird.  We talked about the parts of a bird and ways to indentify them using a field guide.

Here is Mackenzie observing the different size ranges that are used to identify birds.

Here she’s mapping the parts of a bird for her Learn N’ Folder Notebook.

Language Arts 

In First Language Lessons she started working on conjugating verbs and memorizing her first poem of the year, Afternoon on a Hill by Edna St. Vincent Millay.  It always amazes me how quickly she memorizes these things.  One day and she had it down cold. 

She admired the FLL poem printables over at Homeschool Creations.  Mackenzie is  on level 4 so she wanted us to make some for level 4.  So we did. They came out alright considering we made them.  LOL   If  you happen to be using FLL level 4, feel free to download them.  We downloaded the first three levels from Homeschool Creations and now have a nice book of all the poems she’s learned over the years. 

Writing With Ease is still going well.  We read, we narrate, we dictate, etc.  Never much to report there. LOL  I was thinking how it was too bad that we didn’t  discover this until 2nd grade.  If we had, the reading selections would have complimented our history studies perfectly last year.  LOL

Extras

We started our artist study on Mary Cassatt this week.  We read a brief article about her life and Mackenzie made a notebook page for her Artist/Composer notebook.  My plan is to study to pieces of artwork per week.  One will be an oral picture study and the other will involve a notebook page on the work.  We’ll end each artist with an art project pertaining to their work.

In other art news, we worked from How to Teach Art to Children this week.  We continued to talk about lines in art.

She made one piece involving many different kinds of lines.

Later in the week she made another where she had to devote one section to only straight lines and bent angles and the other section to only curved lines.

 

And because I know you care, lol, here’s our newly designated art display.  It used to have a bulletin board with our “daily schedule” in there.  The “daily" schedule” that we ignored on a daily basis.  I got tired of it mocking me so I removed it and decided to make better use of the space. LOL

Oh and for home ec, Mackenzie made brownies the “old fashioned way.”  Without a box.  They were for Daddy’s birthday.

 

And that was our week.  Soccer starts tomorrow so I’ll be able to report about PE.  Woot!

Check out the other Weekly Wrap-Ups over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.