Weekly Report September 1-6, 2008

Week Three.

We schooled Monday, took Tuesday off with Dad and then went back at it from Wednesday to Saturday.

Spelling:
SWR. List K7
Worked on Homonyms and alphabetized the words.

Latin:
Lively Latin: Lesson 7.2 to Exercise 7.5. We skipped the Poem "Horatius at the Bridge." I'm beginning to get very frustrated with this program. We copied out all the declensions on one piece of paper in order to work with them better.

History:
SoTW2, ch. 27. War of the Roses, Narrations, mapwork, timeline and chapter test.

Writing Program:
Aesop: Retold, rewrote and produced final Drafts of the Top and Ball. Both compositions here. I told them they could illustrate their stories when they were done and this is what they did.

Older:



Younger:
Odd. They did their drawing independently of one another. I don't know why both of them did storyboards!

Science:
Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day. Insects.
Metamorphoses diagram. The kids read a bunch of books on Ants, Bees, and watched a DVD on bees.

Read the second half of chapter 10 on defenses and filled out a little review worksheet I made up.

Dictation: 1x.

Recitation:
Poem, The Splendor Falls, 2x.

Bible: (oops)

Geography: Apple Press, Canada Map Book 1, pp. 3-5

Math:
Older: SM 3B, Review A&B, WB 17-22, Practice 4A & 4B, drill: 2x,3x,4x,5x.
Younger: SM 2B, Practice 3A, WB 30-34.

Grammar:
Older: R&S4,7-11
Younger: FLL, 164 to 167

Art:
Lesson plan #15 from this site. This week, we compared and contrasted two different paintings of marriages: Arnolfini Marriage by Van Eyck and The Marriage of the Virgin. We looked at the Arnolfini Marriage in detail (from The Story of Painting by Sister Wendy Beckett, pp. 104-105) and then wrote a list comparing the two paintings. We put small printouts of the paintings on our timeline. For their art project, I used the idea of using a mirror from here and this is what they did:

The Older:



The Younger:



Reading: (6 days/week)
Older: (1 hour/day): 1h and 45 minutes behind.
Younger: (1/2 hour/day): caught up.

Other:
Older: Book Summary of Twenty-One Balloons by W. P. du Bois.

A HUGE success this week: I went to the library and got a ton of books on insects. The kids, the boy in particular, loved reading them. He kept saying, "The male? Right after they, um, mate? He dies." Poor kid.

And now, to prepare next week!

CW Aesop--The Top and Ball Compositions.

These are the kids' compositions this week, based on the model: The Top and Ball by H.C. Andersen.

The older:

THE TOP AND THE BALL

One day a Top fell in love with a Ball. He wanted to marry her because she was beautiful. The Ball did not wish to marry the Top.

“I am engaged to a swallow” boasted the Ball with her nose in the air.


One day the Boy took the Ball out to play. He bounced the ball too high. He lost the Ball and could not find it. Many years later the Top one day spun into the dustbin. He found the Ball in there and she was thoroughly drenched and filthy.

The Top was found, but he never spoke of his old love
again.

By the Younger. (I took her original narration as she dictated it to me, hence the longer composition!)

The Top and the Ball

There was once a Top who lived in a toy box. A ball lived there too. She wore a morocco dress. The Top said. “We should make a very good pair. Shall we be engaged to each other?”

“I am half engaged to a swallow,” the Ball bragged.

Then the boy came to play with his Ball. It looked pretty when it bounced in the air. On the ninth bounce it did not come back down. The boy looked high and low for the Ball but did not find it. The ball was missing for five years.

The Top was gilded and was something to look at. A couple of years later, the Top fell into the dustbin. He found a ball there.

“Finally someone I can talk to,” the Ball said relieved. “I am made of morocco and I have a Spanish cork in my body.”

The more she talked to him the more it became clear that this was the same Ball he had once loved.

Soon the maid came to empty the dustbin and found the Top. Nobody saw or spoke of the Ball. Soon after, she died.

The End

And so, it is.

Planning Art.

Putting together a list of painters to study for the period from 1300 to 1600 is easy.

Van Eyck --1385-1441
Botticelli --1445-1510
da Vinci --1452-1519
Durer --1471-1528
Raphael --1483-1520
Titian --1488-1576
Bruegal, the Elder --1524-1569

and there, I think is as good a stopping place as any. (Maybe.)

My plan is to present the kids with at least one painting every two weeks for discussion, analysis and imitation.

That means 7 lesson plans, paintings and relevant art projects to find, research, prepare and print between now and Christmas.

I've always been too ambitious for anyone's good.

(Though I did find an excellent lesson plan for this week comparing Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage with Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (above) written for fifth graders and a cool art project to go with it. May I continue to be so lucky!)

Today Was Not the Day...

to do the Wars of the Roses.

(Not with less than five and 1/2 hours of sleep, each.)

Chronological Study

One of the reasons I was attracted to the approach of The Well-Trained Mind is that it advises and guides parents to study everything in relation to a particular historical period.

I think it is a wonderful approach to making sense of the world: but have I done it?

No.

Part of the problem is the lack of materials available for elementary school-aged children. Ever see a biography of Roger Bacon written for third graders? I thought not. How about a discussion of Botticelli?

We are just a little over 1/2 way through SoTW 2--about 1400. This is the time when the ice and small streams in art and science begin to melt and start a torrent and cascade of activity.

I'm going to find a way to catch up.

First, though, to the most difficult of areas: Music.

I love the Ambelside Online curriculum for resources. This is what they recommend for a study of Medieval music:

Medieval Era Music (see Notes for this Term)
Listening selections for this term:
1. "A Feather on the Breath of God:
Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen" featuring Emma Kirkby and
Gothic Voices; Hyperion label.

2. "Salve Regina - Gregorian Chant" by
Benedictine Monks of Saint-Maurice & Saint Maur of Clervaux; Philips label,
Silver Line Classics series.
3. "A Dance In the Garden of Mirth: Medieval
Instrumental Music" by the Dufay Collective; Chandos label.

Alternate
Option - "Miri It Is" by the Dufay Collective; Chandos label. [If you choose to
purchase only this CD, we do urge you to check your library for Gregorian chant
and Hildegard of Bingen selections to supplement your study.]

I also introduced the kids to a favourite of mine, the British rock/folk band Steeleye Span. My son particularly loved this Latin ditty:

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I'll have to post about Artists/Art Study and Scientists/Science another time.

Writing. CW Aesop A&B

I have been quietly tearing out my hair over this.

My son and I have done the first four weeks of the first program in the Classical Writing progymnasmata; Aesop. At week five I decided to fold my daughter in with us. This is week six.

The idea of the program is to read the stories and then narrate them. This is familiar territory to us as we have been doing this with our history material for about two years now. (My daughter, actually, has only been at it about a year.)

Then child works on his or her re-telling to meet certain writing objectives. According to the appendix, these objectives are:

By the end of "A:"

1. Change sentence types.
2. Change quotation type. (From indirect to direct).
3. Reposition quote explanatory words
4. Vary utterances
5. Make up new quotes for characters
6. Change noun synonyms and modifiers
7. Come up with verb synonyms.

At the end of "B" the child will be able to do all of the above and

1. Write quotes with different positions for explanatory words and varied utterances.
2. Change the verb modifiers.

We are on Week 6 (of 18) in "A." In my teacher's manual I am told that next week we will begin "adding quotations" to our retelling. Well, we've been doing that from the start! We've also been playing around with sentence types. That was fun for exactly one model!

I was bored with it. I wanted something more interesting and engaging for us. However, until tonight, I hadn't read through the rest of the directions for the re-writes.

Weeks 1-6 focus simply on re-telling. Get the story order right. Get the characters right. (sigh).

However, it seems the fun begins next week.

Weeks 7 to 11 focus exclusively on adding quotations and varying utterances. (This may sound dull, but there are some interesting directions in the Teachers Core manual, such as asking about the tone of voice, how the character may be feeling, his posture, and the look on his face. This could actually be fun!)

Weeks 12-13, the above plus noun synonyms.

Weeks 14-18, all of the above plus verb synonyms.

Now that I have looked through it in detail, it doesn't look too bad. I guess those thesauruses I bought will come in handy!

Weekly Report, August 26-30

Week Two.

Short Version:

Unfortunately, there is still work outstanding which is why I'm late posting this.

Copywork: a, o, c, d

Dictation:
Older--two longish passages
Younger--everyday with FLL.

Recitation: Memorized The Flies and the Honey Pot.

Latin: finished up Lesson 6 and began Lesson 7 in Lively Latin.

Spelling: List K6 in SWR, plurals page.

History: SoTW2 ch. 25 and 26

Writing: Aesop A: not done (and I've decided it won't be on those weeks we double up on SoTW.)

Math
The Younger--SM 2B, Ex. 24- 29
The Older SM 3B Review 1,2, and well, he didn't finish.

Grammar
The Younger--FLL 159-163
The Older--R&S4, 5, 6 and 1/2 of 7. Again he's not finished.

Science:
First half of Ch. 10, Apologia's Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day.

Long Version:

Tuesday.

Up at 6:30am this morning. This time it did not go well! I let them watch Arthur for a bit and what with one thing and another we didn't actually sit down to start until 8:30. Then the Older had to take a bathroom break. He takes looong bathroom breaks.

Spelling (SWR); I started with it. It took 50 minutes to dictate K6. It was torture--for all of us. In six or seven weeks, we start over again at list J. I can't wait!

Latin: Review of Junius Brutus. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought it might be. Note to self: do not take a month long break in the middle of a two part history lesson.

Aesop A: We read The Top and the Ball by Hans Christian Anderson. I took the part of "narrator", The Older was the top and the younger read the part of the ball. When I first read this story this weekend, I nearly cried. The kids had the same reaction. The younger actually said, "I die?" We had a nice discussion of whether the top "really" had loved the ball or not.

I dictated a complicated section to the Older and had the Younger copy it out.

Break.

Oh Happy Day. We did Chapter 25(a) The Plague. And we did the colouring page. And the map. And our narrations--all in about an hour! The younger dictated hers to me and I dictated the first two sentences back. (Boy, has FLL made this process quicker and smoother than it has been with the Older!) The Older wrote his out. Here's what he wrote (after correcting for spelling and punctuation. I don't correct everything all the time, so his idiosyncratic use of caps is retained!)

In the Middle ages people suffered from the Black death (the Plague). People were dying Left and Right and through the window. Animals and humans died from it. Even the sick cloths made everyone get sick. No one could stop the Plague, some said "it's the End of the world!" If you felt a headache or had lumps in your armpits, and a lot of pain, you had the Black death. P.S. It does not exist anymore.

My eight month old nephew arrived and stayed several hours. I can see why Moms with little ones love reading aloud so much! All three sat on the couch (with the dog!) and listened to me read a chapter of The Railway Children. I was surprised, but it calmed the little one (as long as we played his little music toy very softly from time to time. Fortunately it didn't bother me a bit.) My kids were so good with him! My daughter, the Younger, decided she would feed him. So he sat on my son's lap and it went like this:
Daughter: spoon feed baby.
Son: Wipe baby's face
Daughter: pass the baby his sippy cup.
Son: help the baby hold his sippy cup.
Daughter: spoon feed baby.
Son: Wipe baby's face
Daughter: pass the baby his sippy cup.
Son: help the baby hold his sippy cup.
lather...rinse...repeat.

It was funny until he started to fuss--and that was no surprise! But they were so good with him that when my sister arrived to pick him up, I gave them about 45 minutes "off" until we started school again.

Grammar:
Younger: FLL Lesson 159. Prepositions. When she came into the room and saw the table "set" she asked, puzzled, "I thought we were doing grammar."
Older: R&S3, Lesson 5. I had thought we'd do 5 lessons a week--but really, it's enough to do four. Why stress? It's much more thorough and the lessons are longer than R&S 3. But it's still good. It seems to be much more at his level than R&S 3 which felt like going through the motions, even though the material was all new to him.

Math:
Younger: breezed through two money exercises in 2B. She got all but two of the "American coin" questions right. I was surprised! I also gave her a Canadian Coin supplement--but she's been counting change since last year!
Older: Excused from Math today.

Evaluation: Didn't do Bible, or penmanship and neither did their first draft of The Top and Ball. But that's OK. We had Read-Aloud and Baby Feeding 101 instead!

Wednesday.

Up at 6:30.
45 minutes of assigned reading.

Bible--
Proverbs, 2: 6-end. Still dealing with procedural issues. Talked a bit about integrity. Hope they "got" it.

Spelling--
Taught how to make words plural. It was excruciating. I wonder how much they will remember?

Break.

Latin.
The Government of Rome.

Break.

SoTW2: 25 (b) How Europe Changed.
It's tough to do Review questions, narrations, and the chapter test all in one day! And then I gave them a craft on top of it: the Bubonic plague wheel. It was the carrot, you see.

Grammar--Younger did FLL 161--making up sentences with prepositions and nouns. She loves dictation but had a melt down when she realised that she was to write four lines of "Bed in Summer" by R.L. Stevenson. So, I let her write the first two.

Older--writing assignment. I didn't leave clear enough instructions about how to do it, but he did write something! So, that's all right.

Math--
Younger: played with the Rainbow Rock CD for quite a while and then did exercises (2B): 26 & 27
Older: Did yesterday's and today's work, 3B Reviews 1 and 2

Evaluation: It was a horrid day. I was upset and impatient through most of it. We actually made up a new song. (To the tune of the first line: "A sailor went to sea, sea, sea"):

You drive Mommy up the wall (repeat)
You drive Mommy up the wall. (shout).

The kids were singing it again at bed-time (but thankfully without the shouting).

Yikes.

Thursday

Up at 6:30. They read for a while (my daughter wanted me to read Railway Children. I hadn't had my coffee, yet.) and also watched an episode on DVD while playing Skip-Bo. So, I figured their brains were awake enough to start with
Latin. Finished Lesson 6 with a Vocabulary Exercise. Hooray.

Spelling:
This was interesting. I wanted them to do two things: 1) Use alliteration to write sentences from their words and 2) Pluralise at least one list word per sentence. They managed the second (but not the first). It was an excellent review of yesterday's lesson.

Copywork/Dictation.
I set myself up with a trial version of Startwrite (I used to have the full version and it's been a process getting it restored to the computer!) and ran off a sheet of "d's" each which they did.

Then I had my daughter copy while I dictated the following to my son:
"Many died daily or nightly in the public streets: many others died at home" Giovanni Boccaccio

Then we took a break.

As it was too hard to read our poems three times through a grilled cheese sandwich, we moved on to listening to Chapter 26(a) The Battle at Agincourt. Narrations took a long time. Again, the older wrote his directly from doing the review questions orally, and I dictated the first four sentences (two at a time) to the Younger.
Then they had an eraser fight.

Math--
Younger. It was funny. During our first break I corrected her math from yesterday. She had only one mistake, so I took it to her, saying, "Look, you did really well. Only one mistake." and she asked me, "Can I do it now?" So, she did Ex. 27 on her break! She did Ex. 28 after Grammar.

Older--oops. I haven't marked his work for a while and there were a number of errors. I'm a little concerned. We worked on a few corrections, but it is mostly my fault. When did SM start introducing equations with two different kinds of operations? And in the word problems no less?!

Grammar:
Younger--FLL 161. "Before, behind, below, beneath." We actually made up a little dance! That was so much fun.

Older--We went through the lesson part, but didn't do the written work. A friend he hasn't seen for a long time invited him over to play. School starts next week for him, so they haven't much opportunity to play.

However, I think the fact that we've jumped into this is beginning to cause some problems. I had to get out some pencil crayons and mark up a sentence in different colours for identifying the complete predicate, the simple predicate, the verb phrase, main verb, helping verb. ALL so we could then find the simple subject!

Friday
Up at 6:30. Really, really feeling it. So tired, my back felt glued to the bed. When the kids popped in a movie, I didn't say a word but let them watch it until it was done at 8:45.

Spelling test of List K6. The Older got 100%, the Younger missed three. Not bad, but not great either.

Latin: Started Lesson 7. It has been much, much too long since we covered subject/verb agreement and how to find the right declension for the noun. I should probably type up a little handout. If I don't forget. Or fall asleep.

Bible: Proverbs 3: 1-4. Had a great discussion of what it means to be loyal (and kind).

Poetry: They just about have The Flies and The Honey Pot memorized. Time for another one!

History: SoTW2 26 (b) Joan of Arc. Mapwork, colouring page, Timeline, chapter test.

Grammar:
The Younger--FLL 161.
The Older--

Math:
The Younger--Ex. 29 and she made brownies.
The Older--

Saturday
Science:
We did Metamorphosis. It took 1 1/2 hours. I don't want to talk about it.

Independent Reading:
Younger: 2 1/2 days (or 1 hour and 15 minutes) behind.
Older: 3 days (or 3 hours) behind.