Education Update for Oct 5-9, 2009--With Pic's!

"I love school!" and "This is school?  It is fun"---golden words to a homeschool mom!    Our How Would I Spend a Million Dollars Project was very popular to say the least!   I told the littles that they each had one million dollars and handed them a stack of newspaper to figure out how they would spend it.   They had to spend exactly one million.   About 1 hour into the project, houses came into the picture!    That helped them get to the goal much quicker.   My favorite quote---I wish the economy was better, so there wouldn't be so many sales."  

E included bought lots of cars!

E-R started out with a steak dinner

I-E had a whole page of a girl's best friend!

Math:   E-R and I-E started Singapore level 4 this past week.   Place value up to one hundred million was covered.    They finished the first section on place values, all the corresponding assignments, and also reviewed graphs in Intensive Practice 3B.   E took his chapter 6 quiz and worked through lessons 47-50 in Teaching Textbooks.   He is still working on fractions.   This week adding mixed numbers specifically.

Language Arts:  We worked through Chapter 12 of Shurley English.    Direct objects was the concept taught this week.   We also continue to work on those capitalization rules.   E worked in Painless Vocabulary.  Using Write Source,  we started our unit on persuasive writing.  We started out with persuasive paragraphs.   The topic was healthy choices.   E wrote about brushing teeth, E-R about swimming, and I-E about eating less meat.   I feel that really focusing on writing last year paid off.   Last year writing a paragraph was torture.   It would take us a week or more to work through writing a paragraph.    This year has gone much smoother with writing.   Our paragraph this week took two sessions.   One focused on prewriting--gathering ideas and the other sesson on writing and revising and editing.   We had time to move on to starting our persuasive essays which we will finish next week.  We continued working in Sequential Spelling--both levels.   I-E's handwriting book came and we will add that in this coming week.

History:  We finished study Mesopotamia this week.   We learned about Hammarubabi and Sargon.  We had lots to add to our timelines--including the invention of irrigation and writing.   Using History Pockets we made pop-up books about ziggarats.

Science: In earth science we read about rocks and minerals.   We studied different rocks and minerals.   We finally used our rock kit and completed several streak tests with some of the minerals. 

E completed workshops 6-9 and experiments 7-8.   The topics for these experiments were center of gravity and friction as a force that resist movement.   E has not completed the experiments that go with workshop 8 and 9 yet, but they have both already proved to be very popular. 

 Workshop 8 aka shotput device!

That is the days of our lives as I remember it.   Disclaimer--tears, yelling, and tantrums may have been jettisoned from my mind ergo this blog!