New Year, Old School

The holidays were busy as usual, and we didn't quite fit in as much school as I'd hoped, but that is to be expected for this time of year.  I have a few weeks of old lesson plans to finish up before I spend a chunk of time figuring out what to do when, for the rest of the year.  We have some changes to our schedule coming up, and I need to revamp how we will fit in all of our lessons.  Andrew will be taking Theatre at the Solon Center for the Arts.  Eddie will be learning how to golf at the Golf Dome in Chagrin Falls.  And to top it all off, we joined a homeschool Co-op which we will begin attending in February.  I'm excited about meeting some new homeschoolers, and Eddie is excited about hanging around with some of the kids he met at the Fine Arts class.  Andrew will learn to love it, I hope.   He would be an excellent hermit.

So, the kids finished up their classes at the Willoughby Fine Arts center, and we were treated to a Performance Night.  When we first arrived, there was a table in the lobby, where all of there visual arts creations were stacked for us to look through and take home.  Some of Eddie's artwork had gone missing, so he didn't have a big stack.

 

Here's Andrew's portrait of Clancy the Dog.

They worked on comic books, so here is one of Andrew's pages.

The older kids did India ink drawings with quills.

Then, we proceeded to the auditorium, where we got to witness drum circle, modern dance and acting out of scenes.  They were all pretty cute.  Here are some pictures from the performances:

I really need to get a real camera instead of using my phone!

Holiday Week:

We took a break from regular school work for a little bit to do some fun holiday stuff.  Scheduling conflicts seemed to interfere somewhat, so this holiday week wasn't quite as idyllic as last year's, but I think they enjoyed it anyway.

They did some holiday themed math pages, puzzles, stories, etc.  And we read several holiday books, which you can see in my 2012-2013 reading post. 

I let the spelling, punctuation and capitalization go, because I just didn't have the energy, and this was supposed to be fun.  But, I've told these kids they are going to have to stay "after school" for remedial handwriting and language arts, since they can't seem to remember the basic things we covered a gazillion times.

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*notice our family word for ornaments (ornabobs) made it onto both of these pages!

We did a couple of Christmas craft projects, like making these paper trees, and these ice cream cone trees:

Memory Work:

Still reviewing poems, foreign language and science vocabulary, Newton's Law of Motion, and grammar lists.  The boys have begun learning Oh Captain, My Captain by Walt Whitman.  This poem was in both our history book and our poetry book, so it was fated that we learn it.  I so wish they were old enough to watch Dead Poets' Society with me!

Language Arts:

We finished the Grammar Town book.  We reviewed phrases and clauses, and learned about independent and dependent clauses and sentence types.  We started analyzing the sentences in Practice Town and will continue with that book for the rest of the year.

We did a couple more lessons in spelling- with ie words and words that end in y.

Andrew read I Survived: Hurricane Katrina and Ed read The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and they both did book reports on these books.  We are on disc 5 of Jefferson's Sons and still enjoying it.

Math:

We are now done with Lesson 12 in MUS.  We did a couple of Measurement worksheets and talked about adding and subtracting with negative numbers a little.

History:

We did two more chapters in Story of the World, and learned about The Triple Alliance in Paraguay, The Dominion of Canada, the many changes of government in France, and the Second Reich in Prussia.  Lots of stuff happening in the world in the late 1800s!

Science:

We read Chapter 5 in RS4K Physics, Chapter 6 in Basher Physics, and several pages in our Usborne Science Encyclopedia- all relating to chemical and nuclear energy.

We did experiment 5 in the lab book, which was really cool!  We made a battery out of cells.  The cells were pennies, paper towels dipped in salt water, and aluminum foil.  We connected each end to a volt meter to measure the output of our battery, then we added cells to see if more voltage was produced.  The boys plotted their outcomes on a graph.  

French and Latin:

In French, we finished Lesson 5 and learned about conjugating -er verbs.

In Latin, we are learning more about the different verb endings indicating the subject, thus eliminating the need for subject pronouns.

The story of Pandora was also in their Latin books, so I had them illustrate the story.  Here is Andrew's version of what came out of Pandora's box:

And Eddie's:

That about sums it up.  Except for dance at Willoughby, Health and PE kind of fell by the wayside this time around.  I plan to get back on track with it when I start the new section of lesson plans.