Homeschool Week in Review: March 4 - March 8, 2016

This past week felt lighter in "schooling", but the kids had plenty of time for play, creativity, and self-directed learning.  Here's an overview...



History

We learned about the fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks in 1453 (chapter 24 in Story of the World Vol 2).   Of course we had to listen to the song "Istanbul (Not Constantinope)" by They Might Be Giants.

Math

In Beast Academy 3B, the kids learned to multiply by multiples of 10 (like 3 x 700).  They also spent a lot of time solving math problems on Medieval Math Battle and Meerkat Math (both on iPad) and Prodigy Game (on their laptops).

Science

We learned about Charles Darwin and evolution.  I'll write a separate post about the resources I used to teach this subject.

Latin

Song School Latin chapters 5 & 6.

Grammar

We reviewed prepositional phrases and introduced clauses.  The kids' enthusiasm with Grammar Island has been waning, so we're going to move on to Sentence Island without additional review.  Many of the same concepts (parts of a sentence) will be covered, but in the form of a story which I think the kids will love.

Art

The kids have been using Art for Kids Hub on YouTube for drawing lessons.  They also come up with their own creative art projects daily.

Workbooks

I'm trying to get the twins (age 6.5) in the habit of completing their workbooks first thing in the morning.  These are Evan-Moor Daily Practice  workbooks (2nd grade) in Math, Language Arts (mostly sentence correction), Spelling, Six-Trait Writing, and Reading Comprehension.  They only take 5-10 minutes and are a good review they can work on independently.  H (age 4.5) has his own workbooks in 1st-grade phonics (Evan-Moor) and handwriting (Handwriting Without Tears) which he really enjoys.  I think this busy-work might not be the most fun, but it is good practice for standardized testing, establishes the self-discipline of a routine, and makes sure they haven't missed anything from Common Core that their peers have been taught.