Homeschool Week-in-Review: 10/27 - 10/31

I didn't post last weekend about the previous homeschool week. It was a 4-day week since the grandparents were still here on that Monday. We all had colds that week and felt pretty yucky. Thankfully, this past week has been better. Some of the things on this post include work done during that 'missing' week!

Please see the posts below to see pictures of our 1st snow of the season and of Halloween. This post was already too long without those pictures!

Together:

History - We took 2 weeks off from our usual ancient history studies while Maria worked on her Presidential Lapbook (see below). We started back this week studying ancient India and ancient China. Here is a narration by Maria about ancient China. She's really been doing well on her history narrations. Writing is typically a tough subject for Maria with plenty of whining and attempts to get by with the minimum ("Is this enough, Mom?"). However, history narrations have been easy for her lately, and I thought this one deserved to be posted.




The activity guide that we use includes coloring pages for each chapter, which Cati loves! Here is one she did this week. She always uses as many different colors as possible!!



Art: We've been working on this art project for several weeks now. Cati finally finished this week. Maria's still working :) The 1st picture is the original that she had to work from. It is intentionally black and white so that they would have to choose their own color scheme. This is our 1st project on shading.

Here is Cati's interpretation:

Maria:

Sometimes Maria decides to do her work in costume :) She's very happy about her new Mary costume!

Math - She finally got to some new topics this week. She learned how to find the factors of a number. She took her 4th test this week, but I still need to grade it :)

Grammar - She took a test on nouns this week and did very well.

Spelling - She started level 3 of our spelling program this week! It's always fun to start something new! The 1st few lessons work on the different spellings for long A.

Reading - She's reading Black Beauty. She loves horses and is really enjoying the story. In her free reading time, she's gotten into the Happy Hollister books. I've been getting new ones at the library each week.

Chemistry - She did 2 experiments with their reports this week. The 1st one was about moving oil and water drops on wax paper to see that polar and nonpolar molecules are not attracted to each other. The 2nd one showed that the work of stretching molecules (using a rubber band) produces heat.

Election Lapbook - Here is the election lapbook that Maria worked on for 2 weeks. In the video, Maria explains some parts of the lapbook. Warning - it's more than 5 minutes long! :)

Cati:

Math - She started working on counting by 5s this week in preparation for adding nickels to our daily coin cup. She also learned how to draw line segments with a ruler. It's kind of one of those things that you take for granted - that a child just knows how to hold a ruler to make a straight line. It's something she'll have to practice daily now on her worksheet. She has to draw her own line at the top of the page for writing her name.

Grammar - Cati started working with nouns.

Reading - Cati always reads to me for 30 minutes per day. She always reads to me from her religion book, and then we read something else. Sometimes we use one of our phonetic readers. Sometimes we read a library book about one of our history or science topics. This week was about whales! We also started Charlotte's Web as a read-aloud before bed.

Spelling - Her lesson this week was based on this rule: "I and O followed by 2 consonants may be long."

Biology - She finished her lapbook about marsupials (kangaroos, koalas, opossums, tasmanian devils, etc.) and started a new one about whales. Here is a picture of her marsupial lapbook. Chiara was trying to invade the pictures on the side :)

There were so many minibooks, that we had to use the back of the 2 bottom flaps to have enough space. I'm so glad I found these lapbooks. She LOVES working on them!

She explains some of the parts of her marsupial lapbook in this video. I hope she's speaking loudly enough for you to hear! This video is only 1 minute long :)

Even though Cati is doing all this work this year, she still has plenty of time for building Little People villages with Matteo :)

I haven't posted a video of Cati's piano practice before, so here it is! Please, please ignore the VERY messy playroom in the background.

Chiara:

Chiara has really taken off in her speech over the past couple of weeks. She can say just about anything, and she talks CONSTANTLY! She learned her 1st Italian work a couple of week ago - "mio!" (mine). She picked it up during a discussion we had about the last piece of cheesecake from my birthday :)