Things Going on Here: School-related Stuff

Okay, we've been too busy lately to post a Weekly Report, so here's a summary of some of the stuff we've been up to school-wise for the past couple of weeks:

LANGUAGE ARTS

Thalia is zooming through the final season of Analytical Grammar, which bears an amazing resemblance to various pages of First Language Lessons -- many pages of plural vs. possessive vs. plural possessive, many pages of capitalization rules. The other evening she was reading one of the Maximum Ride novels (prepatory to the U.S. release of Fang this morning) and was going on and on about the phrase "on the Earth" since the use of "the" made "Earth" a locus and therefor not suitable for capitalization. When I was her age I wouldn't have had a clue -- locus? really? -- although I could've reasoned it out by realizing that you wouldn't say "the Mars" or "the Jupiter". Of course, we often make fun of James Patterson's writing ability, although I sort of put the blame for that particular blooper on his editors.

And AnnaBeth is zipping through First Language Lessons 4, diagramming compound sentences, memorizing "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (appropriate for St. Patrick's Day, yes?). I think today in Writing with Ease 3 we'll start working on "Jabberwocky". So far she likes WWE3, but we're only 4 weeks into it.

Thalia and I are reading War of the Worlds and discussing. For example, we had checked Transformers out of the library, and it struck me that the beginning was sort of like a modern-day rehash of WotW. Swanky literary commentary, eh? Are you impressed with how clued in to cultural literacy we are here?

Thalia has also started working more diligently on the Jump In writing assignments, thanks to which she realized that Anne of Greene Gables is later referred to as "Anne Blythe" -- not much of a spoiler, but still fun to make the association.

MATH

Thalia is working on fractions, and AnnaBeth is working on decimals. Yawn.

SCIENCE

Thalia continues Apologia Physical Science in a co-op setting. Last week they stood out in the rain pounding rocks together to see how quickly the sound travelled.

AnnaBeth and I are working on various Junior Girl Scout science badges. I keep meaning to post about these separately, but that would require actually writing blog posts, so who knows when that will happen.

READ ALOUDS

As hinted above, we continue to read Anne of Green Gables at lunch time. AnnaBeth and I read Twenty One Balloons -- Thalia had recently read it, so declined sitting in on the read aloud. And AnnaBeth and I also recently read Mr. Revere and I, excerpts of which were used in WWE3, which piqued my interest in the book.

HISTORY

Zooming through Story of the World 4. We've read about Krakatoa (which is why we were reading Twenty One Balloons), about the war between Chile, Bolivia and Peru (both kids claim no memory of reading Secret of the Andes back when we were doing Sonlight, so we might drag that back out), about the Second Reich, Japan's Meije restoration (and no, reading 43 Naruto books doesn't count as a literary tie-in). And whatever else SOTW4 covers in this time frame -- it's all starting to blur. The other day AnnaBeth was mixing up Bulgaria and Bolivia, which is probably a sign that we're moving through this too quickly.

OTHER STUFF

Mango French and Mango Spanish continue to be popular. Drama classes have honed the kids' ability to tell wild stories with sincerity, which probably isn't a good thing. Piano recital pieces have been assigned.