Homeschool Week 3/23 - 3/27

We had a good week. We're getting to the end of our school year. We've been working hard so that we can finish by the end of April (hopefully) before Elena arrives! Our biggest accomplishment of the week was completing Maria's standardized test for state requirements. Yeah! We're glad to have that out of the way!

We continued learning about Julius Caesar this week in history. Here is Cati's narration (in my handwriting) about what we learned.

Here is Maria's chemistry experiment for the week. Write-up is first, pictures below.

Jars on day 1...

Jars on day 3...

Here is some of the kids' work that I usually don't show...

Part of Maria's writing each week includes dictation. It is something new for her this year. Dictation is good because she has to think about handwriting, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling all at the same time, and retain a couple of sentences in her short-term memory. These skills are difficult for a beginning writer and are necessary before a person can really focus on original writing.

Here are 2 of Maria's dictation writing exercises from this week which were from passages about the California Gold Rush of 1849.

This is from Cati's Grammar exercises this week. She began learning about alphabetical order.

Here is some of Cati's cursive practice from this week.





One of Cati's math lessons this week was about symmetry. It was a very exciting lesson because it included paint! Here is a video of what she did.



Here is one of the symmetrical designs that she made.



Of course, all math lessons following this will be disappointing in comparison :) The next day, Cati was sitting eagarly at her desk waiting to begin math and asked, "What are we learning today?!"
I answered, "Today we are learning about subtracting 10 from a 2-digit number and ordering 2-digit numbers."
Cati responds, "But, that's not fun! I want to paint again!"
Oh, well!


Cati finished her spider lapbook this week:

Here are some things Cati brought home from her St. Vincent classes on Friday.

This is her butterfly family from her "Animal Art" class :)

This is an octopus from her "Under the Sea" class.

Something new and exciting around our house lately are pen pals! Cati and Maria recently started writing to pen pals who we found through one of my homeschool email groups. In the most recent letter from Cati's pen pal, she asked Cati what her favorite piano song is to play. In the letter she wrote back (which we hope to mail this afternoon), Cati answered her pen pal and promised a video on the blog so that she could hear it! So, here it is...

Entertaining Chiara in the mornings is one of my most difficult tasks. Thankfully, she had a renewed interest in Wedgits this week!

Here is a funny video her her playing with them. When she 'disappears' during the video, she is coming behind the camera to she her creation on the camera screen.

I'm sorry that I don't have anything to show for Matteo this week! He's still working on his reading and writing. He also LOVES his audio books on CD!! We've heard the Gingerbread Boy so many times, that we can almost recite it :)

Only 4 more weeks of school around here!!!

Homeschool Week 3/16 - 3/20

This week we began studying Julius Caesar in history. Here is Maria's narration on what we read this week.




Maria got back to chemistry this week.

Maria was inspired to to make an abstract watercolor painting this week :)

I usually only post about the kids' history, science, and art, but we do study other things! These 2 pages are Cati's spelling test for the week. Our spelling program doesn't just test 10 words in a list each week. The girls write 12 sentences (over 2 days) from dictation for their spelling test for each lesson. I think it's great because it automatically reviews words for previous lessons. I've also found that it's not too hard for kids to spell words correctly when they're focused on a certain list. But, they have much more trouble when they have to use the same words in a sentence. This spelling program has been so great!

This was Cati's 1st lesson on "consonant+le" words.

Cati made a watercolor painting of our family yesterday :)

Here is Maria doing her favorite thing...reading! She read "The Secret Garden" this week. She didn't finish the narration, so I don't have anything to post for it. She really enjoyed the book and chose to read it during her "Free Reading" time this week, too.

Cati started reading "The Little House on the Prairie" this week.

Just in case any of you were worried about Chiara being neglected when the new baby comes, you can see that she always has the arms and laps of her other 2 mothers to go to :)

Finally, I have a video of Matteo giving ME a math lesson this week!

Homeschool Week 3/9 - 3/13

Here's our week!


In history this week, we did a lot of reading! From our history spine, Story of the World, we read 2 chapters about ancient India and 2 chapters about ancient China. And, we read the following book, You Wouldn't Want to Work on the Great Wall of China, which was good.



In science, Maria finished her work on nutrition for her school district homeschool requirement. Next week, we should be able to get back to our usual chemistry studies!

Maria read a book about Marie Curie this week and wrote a paragraph about her.









Cati finished her butterfly lapbook and started on her spider lapbook.

















She's been practicing cursive a little bit everyday. Here's sample from last week. She enjoys putting stickers on her work when she's done :)

Here's some penguin artwork that Cati brought home from St. Vincent on Friday.

Chiara wanted to show off her artwork, too!

Matteo made this "Cat-in-the-Hat" hat during his preschool class at St. Vincent yesterday.

It's not often that I get to post a picture of Maria doing something besides reading and writing. She doesn't have much in the way of hands on activities in her subjects anymore. But, this week, she had to make a page showing decimals with decimeters, centimeters, and millimeters. She had lengths of these measurements that she had to cut and tape together according to the given decimal. (See the picture below this one for a better explanation!)

Here is Cati measuring with 1" tiles during math.

EVERYDAY, my biggest challenge with Chiara is during Cati's math. Chiara ALWAYS makes a mess with some of the manipulatives. Here she is on one of her missions this week!

Have a great week!

Homeschool Week 3/2 - 3/6

We had a good week. Dany was on Spring Break, so our schedule was a bit more relaxed than usual :) Spring break at St. Vincent also meant that the kids didn't have their classes there on Friday afternoon.

In history this week, we learned about the Punic War between Rome and Carthage.
Here is Maria's map showing Hannibal's route from Carthage, through Spain and Gaul, down across the Alps and to Rome.

Here is Cati's coloring page about Hannibal.

And, here his Cati's narration about the Punic War (in my handwriting).





Here is Maria's narration on St. Therese of the Child Jesus, based on this book:





(Maria really wants to use this regular lined paper, but it doesn't do good things for her handwriting :) She'll get used to it eventually.)

Maria's still been working on her pointelism that she became interested in during her last art class at St. Vincent.

Cati finished her Bee lapbook on Tuesday. Here is a picture and video of her Bee lapbook.

She started a lapbook about butterflies on Wednesday. Here are some library books that she read this week about butterflies.

Maria has to complete a Health credit for the district homeschool requirement, so that's what she worked on for science this week. No pictures :)

Here is Matteo keeping himself entertained during the school day :)

Cati wanted me to take a video of her playing the piano :)

Here is a video of Cati and me playing a game during math this week, the Attribute Train game. We had one large and one small circle, square, rectangle, and triangle in 4 different colors (green, red, yellow, and blue). You can see the pieces here:

We divided these pieces between the two of us randomly and took turns placing pieces. To to place the next piece of the train, your piece could only differ from the one before it by one attribute.

Here are Chiara and Matteo playing with Dany (who got to come since he was on Spring Break) during the girls' gym class on Thursday.

Look! Cati's really starting to swim!!!

Here is Chiara waiting patiently with Papa for the kids to get changed after swimming lessons. She's getting so big!!!




That's all I have for this week! Have you noticed how close that baby ticker at the top of the blog page is getting to the end ?!?!?! Baby Elena will be here before we know it :)

I added a new link showing the curriculum that the kids are using this year. It's on the right side of my blog page. I'm always so excited when I figure out how to do something like this :) :)