Ahh, another week down. These winter months get so sluggish. Yuck. All of us are dreaming of warmer weather and a trip down to St. George! In the meantime, when the air isn't too yucky, the kids love to go over to our neighbor's homemade hockey rink and play. Thank goodness for their generosity to share! It has been getting much needed wiggles out!
For out tech courses this week, Elsie, Kimball, Anna, and I (Peter listened in some) finished chapter 2 of Starting and Growing my Business. We watched a couple videos and learned about finding unmet customer needs and competitive advantages. We thought about our business ideas and asked ourselves if they met customer needs. We thought about our passions and talents and thought of how we could use them as a competitive advantage. Peter started on his assignment in mindcraft he designed his own skin and built it in paper. He uploaded it to mindcraft. The software that he was supposed to use didn't work, so he had to find a different website.
For science we learned more constellations: orion, taurus, pleiades, and gemini. We made a page for each constellation in our star books we are putting together. We also found several of the constellations outside at night. Peter went to his forensic class as well and learned about good places to look that criminals will hide evidence. Some examples he told me were in a fence post or under chicken crap.
For math Anna worked some more on counting and writing to 100. She was armed with knowing the patterns for writing it out, and was able to do it all on her own. She also reviewed counting by 10s. Elsie learned how to find the volume of cubes this week, which was chapter 26 of her math book. She also reviewed division, and conversions (such as miles into feet and quarts into pints), and did several story problems. Peter did chapter 26 as well in his math book, where he learned how to add and subtract time, which has a base of 60. He reviewed geometric angles finding the surface area of various geometric shapes. Peter also went ot his Pyramid project class and worked out a coded message to figure out how to make cookies. Kimball took a big step in math this week as he started multiplying 2 digit numbers together. He is learning the importance of place value and precision. He also reviewed addition and subtraction with regrouping and conversion problems. The kids have had a fun time figuring out some puzzles the "school fairy" brought them. They are from a Great Minds series, and are puzzles named after great astronomers: Hubble, Kepler, Galileo, and Halley.
Peter was busy with a challenge this week to write in his journal every day for his Pyramid project. He is trying to think and act more like a scientist. He also wrote a poem. He finished reading The Magician's Nephew as well. Elsie read about 30 pages of Little Britches and several short excerpts about various world explorers such as Vasco de Gama, De Soto, and Amerigo Vespucci. She worked on her cursive and did several worksheets and started writing a story for her sister. Kimball read outloud to me from Dinotopia some more. He reads about 1 to 3 pages a day, about 4 to 5 times out of the week. He also passed off another spelling test, and started on another expert to study and spell out correctly. Anna read another chapter, The Colt, and started another called What Can I Do? out of her First Steps primer. She learned the "ay", "able", "ate", and "ope" blends. She also did some copy work to practice her handwriting, as she tried to copy some of her sister's stories.
The kids went to their string and piano lessons again this week at Bows and Bridges. Peter finished book 1 in the viola Suzuki series and started on book 2! He is learning to play Maccabees. Peter, Elsie, Kimball, and Anna all worked on practicing the challenges they were given for the week.
We also had a fun time learning a little about the state of the world when Marco Polo was making his voyage. We learned that the Vatican moved from Italy to France for about 70 years. We also learned how Spain was taken over by the Saracens, or Arabs, and then invaded by the Moors as well. We learned that Italy was a very popular place for commerce (a new word for us), but was not united at all. In fact, the major cities were often warring with each other.
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