Weekly Report 3/26/10

MATH:

Thalia is working in fractions (chapter 11) in Jacob's Algebra.

AnnaBeth is still working on decimals in RightStart Level E. Yesterday were problems using retail gasoline prices ... the examples in the book were around .99 and 9/10s. "Isn't that pretty cheap for gas, Mommy?" Um, yeah.

SCIENCE:

Thalia's co-op class is studying light, which she says is extremely boring.

AnnaBeth has been working on various Junior Girl Scout badges. Aside from finishing up the Science Discovery badge, she's also working on the Oil Up badge, and has started the Earth Connections badge's plant identification activities (learning 10 trees and learning about 5 native plants along with their traditional uses).

WRITING

Thalia wrote a persuasive paper guided by her Jump In writing program. When I cautioned her about overuse of exclamation points (one is plenty for a short paper) she made a caustic comment about the writing in Apologia Physical Science, which she linked to a further caustic comment about a popular fiction author. Ahem. Life with a middle schooler is so fun.

AnnaBeth studied poetry in Writing With Ease 3, which uses Lewis Carroll and Jack Prelutsky as examples.

GRAMMAR

Thalia is working with pronoun antecedents in Analytical Grammar. By the way, as of last week she has finished the punctuation sections of Analytical Grammar, scoring quite high. So why was there a big fat comma splice in the first paragraph of that persuasive paper? Are we planning on applying any of this swanky grammar-stuff?

AnnaBeth is on lesson 65 of First Language Lessons 4. The week started with a poetry review in which she recited from memory "Afternoon on a Hill" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysse Shelley, "How Doth..." by Lewis Carroll, "Learning to Read" by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats. The rest of the week has been spent on types of sentences and direct quotations.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Thalia continues Mango Spanish.

AnnaBeth has completed the "basic" level of Mango French and is now trying the "complete" level. Although she's learned how to say de rein, but A Femme d'un Certain Age says to use je vous en prie. But perhaps that's for older women, and not 10 year olds. Or perhaps for the upper class, and not we peasants. Ah, the subtleties! If we move to France I shall be paralyzed with indecision over which to use.

HISTORY

We should've studied the opening of Suez Canal, but we didn't. But, it will still be there next week. That's the great thing about history -- it sticks around. We should get to it next week, so stay tuned.