Weekly Report: Term 2, Week 5

An example of Baroque (in terms I understand!)


I think we've had a breakthrough. On Friday, at the kids insistence, we started with history. The day just zipped by.

Somehow, I got it into my head that our Latin and Math must be done first thing in the morning. The kids have often protested, declaring their brains just weren't awake yet. I just re-read Campbell. What he actually says is this:

Classical languages (Latin and Greek) and math should be given the bulk of the student's time and his best hours, whenever those may be. LLC, 1st ed., p. 61

Well, duh.

So, I'll try reading to them first thing in the mornings, then. Let their brains kick into gear with something not quite as demanding as Latin and math. It just means my eyelids will have to be fully open--and that'll be a challenge!

Morning Subjects:

Bible Study.
Explorer's Bible Study: Discovery. Words of Wisdom: Job, Psalms and Proverbs.
We did Lesson 3. It's bothering me only slightly that I don't have an answer key and that the kids are using their NIV's while the text of the lesson is presented in NKJV. I would rather they both had NKJV's. Of course, my son wants to use his NIrV exclusively. We compromised and agreed to consult it when things weren't entirely clear. For once, though, I am finding I don't like the NIV. Not for this book.

Latin.
Lively Latin, Big Book 1.


With this review map, we're finished! Done! Kaput. We did vocabulary review and and our drill sheets. Here's a blog entry about how we used the program and things I wished we'd done differently. We will continue to review this week.


Spelling.
Spell to Write and Read.
Skipped it.

Grammar:
The Older: Rod and Staff 4, Lesson 83 and Lesson 86.
With great nervousness, I skipped all the writing lessons.

The Younger: Rod and Staff 3, Lessons 58 to 61.
Everyday (since we do grammar everyday) I'm thankful for the grounding FLL1 has given my daughter.

Math:
The Older, Singapore Math 4B. Weeks 6 & 7.

The Younger, Singapore Math 3A. Weeks 14 (and a smidgen of 15).

Composition.
The Older: Homer A. Week 3. The Wind and the Sun.
We took it slowly and worked on finalizing his draft.

The Younger: Aesop A, week 17.
We used an early model: Androcles and the Lion rather than the more difficult biblical model offered by the workbook. My daughter loved it.

Afternoon Subjects

Science.
Singapore i-Science. Chapter 3C: The Human Respiratory System.
We did this in the evening and only got done about 1/2 what I wanted. The husband decided to blow up a balloon and then insert it into a bottle. That distracted the kids totally from their own stuff.

History.
Meghan's Reading Plan with adaptations.
We're taking a break from SoTW Vol.3: Early Modern Times until we catch up to the events in Chapter 15, when King Louis sent the Carignan-Salieres Regiment (and the Filles-de-Roi!) to help the colonists and fur traders in New France.

Key:

CHD: Canadian History for Dummies, by Will Ferguson

SC: The Story of Canada, by Moore and Lunn

Map bk: Canada Map Book 6: Exploring Canada's History by George Quinn (Apple Press)

Day 16: CHD: p. 48-50 Quest for a North-West Passage (Fool’s Gold and Martin Frobisher),
Spirit of Canada, p. 20 Hunting for Unicorns
Trace where Frobisher went on a map, Timeline. Worksheet: Cabot, Cartier and Champlain.

Day 17: SC: p. 38-41, Northern Seas,
CHD: p. 50-52, Quest for a NorthWest Passage (The Lonely Fate of Henry Hudson), timeline.


Day 18: CHD: p. 52-53, Rule Britannia, An Empire Founded by Fog?
SC: p. 27 The Pirate Admiral
Fisheries notebooking page, Map bk.6: p. 16 & 17

Day 19: CHD: p. 53-55, The Two G’s., SC: p. 41-43, Rats, Weeds and Viruses.

Day 20: CHD: p. 55-58 The Beothuk, Spirit of Canada: p. 105-106, The Ballad of Mary March

Dictation. (1x)
The same passage for both.

Fine Arts:
Music: Beautiful Feet Guide to Classical Composers.
Art: Artistic Pursuits, Book 1.

Finally! On Saturday we got to it.
We listened to the CD on Corelli and defined words like Baroque and fastidious. (Which means something other than what I thought it meant. I thought more nit-picky and tidy than exacting and difficult to please.) They also drew their first "official" composition.

Lively Latin.

I'm guessing it took us a year and a half to do Lively Latin.

We did take a bit of a break last summer--and that was a big mistake. We lost our momentum and, in retrospect, I can see that we forgot an awful lot as a consequence. We probably could have made it up with extensive review, but I didn't know to do that. The program also doesn't have extra excercises and I found that a problem from time to time.

My students were a 10-11 year old boy and a 7-8 year old girl. We started with one lesson and excercise per day. We did the history whenever it came up. (Some days it was the only way my son would do Latin. He loved the history, the actual Latin, not so much.) We sat down at the computer and recited the vobaculary sheets every single day (well, 4-5x/week). (I encouraged the kids to say the English after saying the Latin).

I also made up vocabulary bingo cards--here's the site I used. I'd write the Latin on the bingo card and then call out the English. (You could also make some up in reverse). We'd use M&M's or chocolate chips for markers. They love it.

The flashcards with the program are useful--IF you keep up with them and start sorting them into nouns and verbs (and later, adjectives). Once you have the nouns--colour coding them by declension would have been a fantastic thing for us to have done. (In fact, I think I will do just that next week. I want to do some solid review before we carry on.) Once you have verb endings and declensions to memorize, set up a drill sheet. I "borrowed" mine from someone at the WTM boards. I think it may have been Cajun Classical. I used the one called "sum" 2x--once for the three tenses of sum, and one for the three tenses of all the other verb endings. The second sheet is for the noun endings.









Here was our daily procedure.

A. 1) Send one child to the computer to do current vocabulary sheet.2) Have second child fill out the drill sheets. Switch.

B. 1) Read Lesson out-loud, together.
2) Do excercises together. Use vocabulary sheets as necessary. If it's history, I just had the kids take turns reading out-loud. We did whatever there was to do as follow up. We did not do the History booklet. However, if I were to do this again, I would have purchased the Greenleaf guide to The Famous Men of Rome. The course uses this book and The Story of Rome to provide the history sequences. If we had, we could have simply used this as our history for the year and I would have been well satisfied and less stressed.

We really should have taken a day and dispensed with the vocabulary at the computer and done our Vocabulary Bingo more regularily. The course also provides games and my daughter was the only one who played them. (I couldn't get them to work for a while either. I just kept downloading Java until, one day, mysteriously, they worked.) Her grasp of vocabulary is much better than my son's.

The course does not hold your hand and as a novice, I missed that. However, it was interesting, varied, and solid. The kids don't hate Latin. For all that, I gladly gave up the hand-holding.