Week in Review: January 4-8, 2016

[rodandmegs]

Ok Girls,

What was YOUR week Like?

You can post:

a- A picture
b- A blog Link
c- A written synopsis
d- Your favorite memory
e- Anything you want that shares your HOD excitement!

Important Note: If you are linking us to your blog, please make sure it's not just a general link, but to your specific post of HOD. That way if someone reads through these a year from now they can find your share without needing to hunt!

[rodandmegs]

http://myfullhandsandheart.blogspot.com ... it-16.html

Unit 16 in Bigger Hearts.

[wonderfilled]

Here's our week 16 in Bigger Hearts. I enjoyed looking at yours Megan! I liked seeing how your children's watercolor paintings turned out. It looks like one of your children decided to do a pirate ship.

http://wonderfilleddays.com/bigger-hear ... y-unit-16/

[LynnH]

Our week in the World History guide http://graceandfur.blogspot.com/2016/01 ... 82016.html

[my3sons]

US1 High School:
It felt good to have a full week of school in after all of the schedule changes over Christmas and New Year's Eve! It also felt good to be healthy again, as we were sick with the flu after Christmas and New Year's Eve. We were sad to have missed spending precious time with my oldest sister, who came to see us from Texas. That time always goes too fast, but God has a plan for everything, and He had a reason for us to be sick. I do think we grew closer as a family from it, and we also remember to once again thank God for good health! I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year's Eve, and that you too are enjoying getting back to the comfort a good school routine brings.

This week in history Wyatt learned about the Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania colonies. He used multiple resources to research answers to his U.S. Map Activities questions and map. I like the meshing of using the globe, the "U.S. History Atlas," the "US1 History Notebook" maps, and information from his various US History living books/resources. It's a good thing he has a table he can spread out on! For those of you doing previous HOD guides, all of those 'geography' activities the dc do lead up to them being able to do high school level geography activities well independently - so worth the time and effort earlier on to do well! He also did a Talking Points Narration on Enlightenment, where he prepared an index card with headings/details and gave an oral narration using his notes/narration along with reading and interpreting a quote by Franklin. On another day, he gave a Detailed Narration by listing out topics to include in his written narration, and after reading it to me and editing it as he did, highlighting all of the topic words/headings he included in his written narration. Again, those younger HOD guides' oral and written narration activities all prepared Wyatt well for these higher level narrations he is doing in high school. For Living Library, Wyatt is reading "Ben Franklin's Almanac," and he is loving it! He finds Franklin to be very witty and clever, as well as very quotable. He had no trouble finding quotes he wanted to use for his double-entry journal format assignment.





Wyatt's Common Place Book continues to have lovely pages of quotes added to it each year of high school. He likes to write them in cursive, as he thinks they are special. Many of them are Scriptures, so I find that pretty special too. He also highlights the questions he uses for his prayer time from his prayer starters, and it helps him model his prayers in his Bible Quiet Time after the Lord's Prayer in a personally applicable way...


Wyatt told me just yesterday that he is especially loving his Chemistry this year. Hooray! I was worried about my ability to help him with Chemistry, as it's been awhile since I've done chemistry, and as it was never my thing. Well, no worries! The textbook is so clear, is also Christian, and is very narrative. It also has a fantastic answer key!


Government is another interesting course Wyatt is taking this year, as is Constitutional Literacy. He is learning to research various Supreme Court rulings, and though it stretches him, he is really enjoying it!


Finally, Foerster's Algebra 2 and R & S English march on. He is doing well in both, though both are difficult and require him to stay on top of what he is learning each day. We both appreciate Chandler's 'help' and schedule of the most important problems to do each day in Algebra, and we also both appreciate HOD's recommendation to do much of R & S English orally/independently, and then write only 1 section...


In Christ,
Julie

[my3sons]

Revival to Revolution:
This week Riley finished Unit 16 and did the first part of Unit 17, learning about Napoleon, Waterloo, and William Carey. He enjoyed reading "The Story of Napoleon" for history, and he was quite theatrical in his oral narrations about him. He is developing his own style of orally narrating, and it often includes pacing, hand gestures, voice inflection, theatrical elements - quite entertaining for me to listen to. He did a good job of drawing Napoleon, even though he always says he 'can't draw faces.' I told him to look at his "Draw and Write..." picture of Napoleon, and use his thumb to measure the length/width of Napoleon's head, and make his that size on his paper. Then, I told him to think of it like a science or math problem, paying attention to the sizes, lines, and shapes of each part of his face systematically from top to bottom as he drew. I thought this would appeal to him, as he loves thinking in this way, and I was right! HOORAY! He felt very good about the results and told me he thought he could draw faces quite well now.


Riley did his written narration about Napoleon in Portugal, and he did a good job of organizing it into 3 block paragraphs. The one thing we are working on right now is remembering to add commas before conjunctions. For awhile, he put commas everywhere. Then, he put commas nowhere. Now, we are getting to the point where he knows where to use commas properly in every instance except for before conjunctions. Progress! We had a good talk about the painting of Napoleon on the island, looking out to sea, and how nostalgic it appeared. Riley is a boy full of such emotion, and he said he just felt so sad for Napoleon, a conqueror of countries and a man with such an adventurous spirit being confined to an island. The painting captured that mood well...


Riley's composer study was about Robert Schumann, and he thought the piece he listened to sounded like cats playing together mischievously. We have 3 cats, and I would agree!


In Exploration Education for physical science, Riley was able to see how magnets and electricity can be a forces that work together to spin a wire either direction. He loved doing his experiments with this, and called each of his brothers over multiple times to show them.


For DITHOR, we had a fun kickoff where the boys acted out the Battle of Bunker Hill. They built a fort like Bunker Hill, and Wyatt was the British side who drove the Americans (Riley and Emmett) out of Bunker Hill...


I scheduled their readings, and I snapped a picture of how I like to schedule chapters sometimes, as opposed to page numbers...


Finally, in R & S English, Riley worked on the skill of using his outline to organize his paragraphs of writing about a topic...


In Christ,
Julie

[my3sons]

Bigger Hearts for His Glory:
Emmett finished Unit 21 and did the first 4 days of Unit 22 this week. He really loves the history readings we are doing this year in the Eggleston books. He did a neat notebooking assignment about Andrew Jackson, or "Old Hickory." He made a tree and wrote facts about Andrew Jackson on its branches, and it turned out so well! Another history story he loved hearing was about John Audubon being a great shot with his gun. All the boys joined in the fun of me tossing up a cap and them shooting it with their nerf guns. They also had fun shooting the wick of a 'lit' candle, which Audubon could hit 100 paces back and shave off just a little wick while still keep the candle burning.


Emmett's vocabulary cards went right along with his history readings, and he especially liked making the picture of his opossum. He actually was able to look up the words in his history book himself, read them in context, tell me his guess about what each word meant, look up his words in his dictionary ON HIS OWN, and make his cards ON HIS OWN. HOORAY! I love being where we are in the guide...


In science, Emmett has been learning about bees, about how they make honey, about how the lines of a flower lead a bee to the pollen, and about how pioneers tended bee hives. He loved his notebooking assignments of drawing bees and of showing how the lines of a flower act as paths for the bee to follow to the pollen/nectar...


He also loved his science experiment, which showed how there is an air pocket between the boat and the water that keeps it afloat and keeps the boat dry on the inside...


In math, Emmett is adding money and making change, and in R & S English he is learning to write paragraphs with details based on his senses...


In Christ,
Julie