Smrt Lernins

I didn’t die from pneumonia, so I was able to return to schooling this week! With the completion of this week, we’ve done 140 days of school, so only 40 days left to go to meet our required number of days for our first year of homeschooling.

While we wait for our next set of math books, we’re taking a brief math break and doing a language arts-intensive week or two. Captain Science completed chapters 5 & 6 in Caesar’s English 1. We went back and reviewed the sections on appositive and gerunds/ gerund phrases in Paragraph Town (lessons 4 and 5), then lesson 6 (on clear paragraph topics). He also continued working in Building Poems, learning about meter and feet. He read through his Shel Silverstein poetry books and identified exampls of iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. We also discussed different meters and clapped out the rhythm. I’m pretty sure he did some work in Practice Town, but I’m not the one who went over that work, as I wasn’t feeling great, so I’m not sure exactly which sentences he did! Finally, he read Wrinkle in Time for his literature and discussed it with my mother (since we were still over at her house for part of the week). He’s become interested in tesseracts, so we’re going to do some research on that.

We had co-op for the first time after a 2-weeks break. The game class is going to start playtesting a simple version of their food fight game next week. The Brain class students performed an “MRI” on an orange (with raisin and cranberry “tumors”) and made neurons from marshmallows and rope licorice, along w/ their written work. My writing students starting working on dialog vs. exposition, when to “show” and when to “tell,” and are supposed to spend this week writing 10-20 minutes a day and keeping a log of it, in order to develop the habit of regular writing.

Captain Science and Eclectic Girl worked on labs on friction at Patchfire’s house this week for physics. Captain Science had some trouble making sense of one part of the lab setup, but luckily, EG was able to make sense of it. They seem to alternate taking the lead on the physics labs now (or at least, on being the first one to figure out the lab setup), which is an improvement over the previous units, where Captain Science mostly let EG do the thinking. I’m glad he appreciates this smart young woman’s leadership qualities, but I don’t want him slacking off because of it.

The Tank had his “Green Patrick’s Day” party at school and Babypie is gearing up to turn one on the 27th! I’m beginning to prepare our work for next year, including projecting WAY ahead to the end of the year, when EG and Captain Science both start the middle ages and I guide them through an awesome unit study (hopefully EG will be able to be involved in this, *stern look at Patchfire*), where they’ll choose a favorite time period and do extensive research into it, developing a persona (yes, sorta of like in the SCA) and learning what their persona’s life would have been like — what sort of education would they have had? What mathematical and scientific beliefs were in that time period? What foods were eaten? What clothing was worn? What was the political status of their nation and the world? We’ll make clothing, taste the foods, and try our best to attend a local historical recreation event! Only have, you know, 9+ months until we can work on that.