Week in Review - Nov. 3-9

Our week has been pretty quiet. We didn't have any outings and stayed close to home. Part of it is because we now have snow, and I feel like hibernating.

Elijah has been working on fractions, relating them to things like gallons, half-gallons, quarts, and whole notes, half-notes, and quarter notes in 4/4 time. He has been figuring out things such as how much it costs to buy a gallon of ice cream in a gallon bucket vs a gallon of ice-cream in quarts. We played the multiplication memory game and continued to practice addition and skip-counting.

Toviel finished the Book B math and will be moving onto Book C either next week or the week after. We have worked on grafts, geometry, and more practice in problem-solving, addition and subtraction.

This week I introduced Elijah to the dictionary. He learned how to look up words, how to read the phonetic spelling, how to read the abbreviations that tell what part of speech the word is, and he saw that many words have different meanings and usages. We also talked about verb tense.

Our dictations and narrations were taken from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Fairy Tales. We looked at "The Valiant Tailor" and "Briar Rose".

Toviel and I talked more about the different types of sentences. Copywork and narration was taken from "Socks" by Beverly Cleary and "The Wind in the Willows". He is dying to read the entire book "Socks" and so I have it on hold at the library.

While Elijah is working on his books, Toviel usually busies himself with a little project or a game or activity he invents. This week he made up creatures by drawing different types of heads, bodies, arms, and legs on cards. He would select the parts to create individual creatures and then draw that creature on a card. He set himself up so that we could all select our own body parts to make a creature, then he gave us a copy of the creature we created.

Elijah finished two books this week that he was reading simultaneously. One was "Treasure Hunters" by James Patterson and the other was "Desmond Pucket" by Mark Tatulli. He has now started on "Heart of a Samurai" by Margi Preus. It's a Newberry Honor book, so it should be good.

The boys spent some time playing in the newly fallen snow.

I read from Story of the World to the boys. We skipped the activities because they seem burdensome. We read about the Hundred Years' War between France and England, Joan of Arc, the Wars of the Roses in England, a bit about Spain and Portugal, how Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain (we skipped the Spanish Inquisition until they are older), and began reading about Africa and how Ghana got wealthy from tolls required for all the salt and gold that passed through it.

We had some friends over Friday afternoon, but the rest of the week we just stuck to ourselves.

We are watching the Avatar: The Last Airbender series again, playing a bit of Minecraft, and looking at new word search apps. We also started a new read aloud book called "The Landry News" by Andrew Clements.