Saturday, September 11, 2010

Our second week: Sept. 7-Sept 10

Monday was a day off for the Labor Day holiday, so it was another short week for us!

Math:
Review continued with decimals.  Many word problems were worked this week (moan, moan, slump, moan).  We're using the Key to Decimals series for this review.  I was able to purchase a boat load of various Key to books this summer for a nice used price, and I expect to resell the ones we're not using :)  On Friday, we mixed things up a bit by starting math competition prep.  She's signed up to participate in the homeschool group's Math Olympiad team ( http://www.moems.org/) beginning in November.  I think each Friday's math will consist of various old MOEMS problems.  I printed the sample test from the website---she did one problem just by reading it, then did two more during lunch.  She also answered September's problem of the month---I wrote her answer down in my planner to check when the answer appears next month :)  I plan on purchasing one or more of the MOEM books for practice.

Science:
We started with CPO's Earth Science with Chapter 1: Science is Everywhere.  It was the usual "branches of science," observation vs inference, and scientific method of pretty much every middle school science book first chapter.  The labs (called Investigations) were more interesting to Daisy!  With this textbook, there are 2 labs per chapter.  The first this week involved measuring flow rate of water through a bucket with spigot.  Dh is a homebrewer so we had ready access to a spigoted bucket:


Topics included measurement of volume, collecting data, calculating mean, and analyzing data.

On Friday, we did Investigation 1B, using the same equipment but varying the water level in the bucket to see if the flow rate changed.  She made observations, created a hypothesis, collected data,and analyzed the data to test her hypothesis.

The last section of Chapter 1 will be completed on Monday.

History:
This subject is going to be SO much fun this year!  One of Daisy's goals for homeschooling was to have "history" instead of just boring old "social studies."  I think she's had more pure history this year already than all of last school year.

We're using K12's Human Odyssey with Oxford Press's History of the Ancient World volumes plus other resources.  This week she finished reading Chapter 1 of HO and read all of Chapter 2 "Unearthing Sumer."  In Ancient Near Eastern World she read chapters 2 and 3 to correspond with the textbook chapter.  We learned that the semi-nearby University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (http://www.penn.museum/) houses one-third of the treasures of the Sumerian city of Ur unearthed by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s.  Unfortunately, that particular exhibit www.penn.museum/long-term-exhibits/267-iraq.html is closed until March 2011.  Some of the artificats pictured in the Human Odyssey chapter are in the UPenn collection!  We'll be making a field trip to that museum as sonn as we can  in the late winter. As a consolation to not visiting the exhibit now, we spent an hour or so exploring every page and link on the Iraq's Ancient Past website www.penn.museum/sites/iraq/ 

On Thursday, I asked her to write a few sentences about the week's reading.  She wrote a paragraph about Babylon (only covered briefly in the reading, so she read more) and one about the discovery of the burial pit of Queen Pu-abi of Ur.

English:
Grammar covered nouns as direct objects, indirect objects and the objects of prepositions.  We reviewed dictionary entries (how to read etc) and the use of dictionaries to find unfamiliar words. 

She decided to participate in the Young Writer's Program of NaNoWriMo http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/ so I'll get her signed up this week and print out the middle school workbook to use for preparing for November.

The writing program we're going to beta-test for Susan Wise Bauer will be coming our way soon :)

I found a used copy of Michael Clay Thompson's Building Poems and a used copy of Figuratively Speaking so those will be added to the mix in the coming weeks.

Other stuff:
Art:  Daisy sketched a gazillion things this week and drew a comic strip ala Charlie Brown and Lucy with a football.  She chose a craft, recreating a Sumerian mosaic from the gates of Ishtar,  from Hands-on Ancient Peoples vol 1 (Yvonne Merrill) and started painting.  We ran out of time to finish Friday.

Girl Scouts hasn't started yet.  The troop may participate in a local women in aviation event next Sunday.

Ballet started today (Saturday).  Yesterday was the grand reopening of the studio (we'd been in temporary space while the building housing the studio was torn down and rebuilt) which is GORGEOUS!  There's even a separate green room for the boys!  Pictures are on the camera instead of my phone so I'll have to get those uploaded to photobucket to share.

This week, I again kept track of time spent on each subject.  I'm trying to get a better idea of how my on-paper plans correspond to actual time spent each day.  Math varied from 30-60 minutes, science from 15-90 minutes, history from 30-120 minutes, and English from 5-30 minutes!  Whew!

Upcoming next week:  two science labs, a trip to the local state park's nature center for a preview of the year's homeschool classes/activities, and coffee with my friends------Daisy and Daddy will do something as yet undetermined Tuesday morning!  Will they hike?  Will they visit a local museum?  Will they take sketch pads and pencils out into the wilderness?  Will they play frisbee golf?  Stay tuned...




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