Saturday, November 10, 2012

Show and Tell: 11-9-12

Big Crew


   Literature remains the favorite subject for both Justice and Joy.


   Joy wrapped up Fahrenheit 451, and begins War of the Worlds on Monday. I think she'd be perfectly content studying dystopian literature all school year. ;-) We've had so much fun doing literature this way. Some of the questions made her really scratch her brain, then she'd suddenly burst with realization. Moments like that? Reason #5782 we homeschool.






   Justice and I never got out of the first chapter of The Hobbit this week. He read the chapter from the annotated version, a selection from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Oliphaunt, learned more about Belladonna (and what the plant itself actually looks like), we listened to the first Hobbit lecture from Mythgard Institute, and applied some worldview (Tolkien's and our own). The drawing is his attempt at an unfinished drawing of Tolkien's.




   In history they're really enjoying Founding of the United States. This book has original source document replicas found in pockets inside the book. Their favorite one, hands down, was the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. (Shown on the right)







   In science, they are really enjoying Conceptual Physical Science. Now I wish I'd made this our main text from the beginning of the year. Hindsight! The "lecture" from the instructor guide works fabulously. They're grasping the concepts immediately, and with a little extra nudging Justice is doing fine with the little math included. The "Next-Time Question" puzzle was a hoot. Joy was scratching furiously on paper, while Justice kept pointing to the bikers and the bee (see this week's Wordless Wednesday), when he blurted out the answer. He couldn't even tell me what sentence he used to get there, but he was certain that had to be it. He nailed it.

Middle Crew



   Their favorite part this week was the map drawing. They've been labeling the 5 main earth circles for some time. Last week we added a compass to their circles. This week we traced North America, and tried drawing it freehand on their circles page. This is Honor's tracing.














   Honor's freehand drawing of North America.










    Grace drew so lightly hers didn't turn out as well in pictures. Her tracing is on the left, and her freehand drawing is in the right.










    Their second favorite was Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry by Jack Prelutsky. Never does a lesson go by without them clamoring for just one more chapter, as they're falling out of their chair in a giggle fit. Each silly story is followed by a poem to back it up, and a Writing Tip. They wrote out their list of ideas from the tip and illustrated it.

    They've both taken great strides in grammar, spelling, writing and math lately. Just when I think a new concept might be throwing them a curve ball, they smack it out of the park. I'll give Grace one more week of just cursive copywork; she'll be more than ready for going back to With Pencil and Pen by then. Honor continues to grow in Progressive Composition Lessons (book 1), but we're mostly using it for the topics and I'm doing the teaching as he writes.  On Friday they played with fun grammar puzzles from a Scholastic ebook instead of working in their grammar texts, and they used Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry for writing.


Little Crew




   Faith's favorite part is reading books, once again. Her reading has launched into a whole new category. I handed her Owl at Home today, and to her delight she could read a large portion of it by herself. She's steadily fading out having to sound out each word, and her speech is really clearing up as a result. The /j/ and /ch/ sounds are still hard enough for her to get right that she usually just drops them off her words.












   Valor told the camera, "Moh!" when it was his turn this week. (That means NO! in Valor speak, not more.) He's hard enough to get a picture of when he's agreeable! I did manage this one at the playground today. He's holding hat because the wind kept knocking it off.








 


   All of them. I love the action capture in this shot. From left to right, Honor just stuck out past Justice giving Faith an underdog, and Joy just gave Valor a push with Grace peeking between them.


4 comments:

  1. Thanks for adding to the list of books I must own!!

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  2. I love your book selections for The "Big Crew." We like Jack Prelutsky's poetry, too. And Owl at Home was my Bug's favorite when he was younger. We still laugh about some of the stories in that book!

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  3. Thanks to the Mythgard link! Looks amazing!
    Lee

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