The Last of the Lesson Plans

So, we've finished the last of the lesson plans.  Next week we will finish up any loose ends and have a game week.

The highlights for these last few weeks have been:

Language Arts:


They did several more pages of sentence analysis, a capitalization review worksheet, and a mini unit on dictionary skills:

In spelling, they had words ending in -le,  and words with silent letters:

They worked on reviewing all their poems.  Andrew read The Printer's Apprentice and did a book report on it.  Eddie is still reading The Fighting Ground, and will do his book report next week.

We are on the LAST DISC OF INKSPELL!  THE END IS IN SIGHT!

In handwriting, we finished up the upper case letters and did practice pages with all the letters:

Obviously, we will still need to work on cursive handwriting next year!

Math:

We did multiplication review, timed tests, and also did a few Kumon Geometry pages.  We continued learning about Roman Numerals as well.

History:

We read a book called Thomas Jefferson by Cheryl Harness.  We learned how he charged Lewis and Clark with exploring and mapping the new Louisiana Territory purchase.  We started reading Longwalker's Journey by Beatrice O. Harrell in anticipation of learning about the displacement of Native American nations that was soon to follow this westward expansion.

I scanned this prior to his making corrections.

Gotta love when a color blind kid picks his crayons!

We learned about the pointless War of 1812 and we visited a re-enactment of the first siege of Ft. Meigs.  This was by far the best field trip we've ever done.  It was entertaining, educational, and the weather couldn't have been nicer.  The boys (and mom and dad) had a blast.  They had all kinds of activities- You could join the army for a patrol around the outside of the fort (where you were ambushed by the British and Native Americans!).  You could enlist in the militia and practice musket drills.  You could watch a battle re-enactment.  You could listen to music of the era.   There were musket and artillery demonstrations.  It was all around cool!

Eddie was captured by a Native American.  We had to bargain with him to keep our boy! He wanted to take Eddie back to his teepee and teach him to hunt and fish. 

The boys had to pass inspection to be able to join the militia.  They had to have at least 4 teeth and all their fingers.

After that, we learned about the Napoleon's attempts to conquer Europe, his fateful invasion of Russia, and his eventual exile to Elba.   We learned about the brief restoration of the French monarchy, followed by Napoleon's futile attempt to regain control of France.

Then, we learned about Simon Bolivar and Jose San Martin and their efforts at freeing the South American colonies from Spanish rule.

Science:

We did an experiment to see how temperature affects the rate that something dissolves:

Since we are basically finished with our chemistry, I let them do some independent reading in the Usborne Science Encyclopedia.  I didn't even ask them to write anything, but they both did.  Andrew wrote something about planets in outer space, and Ed did this:

French:

We did review and they played games on the computer.

Latin:

They took a test on all the Latin vocab they have learned so far.  The only new phrase introduced was dura lex, sed lex

Music:

They reviewed several songs and started learning Four in a Boat.

Art:

We had a free art day, and Andrew drew some pictures on a notebook cover, and Ed made this design with stencils:

P. E.

There is one last Swim & Gym next week where they learn about kickball.  We went to the sled hill and they tried to sled on grass.  That was amusing.

We've been going on a lot of walks, and I've been making them do calisthenics also.

Health:

We did a review of pool safety.  I thought we'd be swimming a lot by now, but the pool heater is being repaired and the water is just too cold for now.