Grinding the gears

We've kept our noses to the grindstone and have been schooling like nobody's business.  There has been some resistance, but in general, the boys have been co-operating pretty nicely with the at-home school work.  Now, if I could just get that same compliance with everything else, life would be grand!  Hee Hee!

We're on our second semester, and we've started attending a homeschool co-op on Tuesdays.  There are quite a few kids of all ages at this co-op, so hopefully the boys will make some new pals.  They seem to be enjoying it thus far.

They are both taking sport stacking, which if you don't know what that is, here's a youtube video of some kids that are really good at it.  I haven't seen the boys actually doing the stacking, yet, but judging from the sounds coming from their classroom, it sounds like an active and energetic time in there!

They are also both in a class called Games, funnily enough, because they bring games from home to play with the other kids in the class.  So far, Super Mario Memory has been the favorite.

Then we break for lunch, and during our first week, our friend Lilly interviewed us as Family of the Week for the Co-op Newsletter.  Eddie was also interviewed by another girl for the Boy of the Week feature.

After lunch, both boys take fencing.  I'm one of the assistants in that class, so I got pictures of them last week.  Fencing is hard work!

Eddie to the left, Andrew to the right

The fourth session of the day is when they split up.  Andrew is taking a class called The Amazing Human Body, and Eddie is taking a Drawing class.

It appears they've been discussing the digestive system in Andrew's class, which is awesome, because we've been learning about the digestive system in our health book.

Here's the paper he brought home from co-op this week.

Eddie is learning about perspective in drawing class:

He drew his name in 3D in his gigantic drawing pad.

The other outside activities the kids have been doing these past few weeks are theatre class for Andrew and golf lessons for Ed.

Andrew's theatre class put on a puppet show of The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.  They did a wonderful job and I really enjoyed the set decorations.

Eddie is doing well in golf and has moved up to the intermediate level class after just six weeks.  Here he is on his first day:

 

While it makes for a busy week with the driving here and there, I think we're all getting a lot out of all of the activities.

We also took a field trip to the James A. Garfield House in Mentor.  That's a really interesting place, if any of you local people have never been there.  It's a National Park Service site, so they have a Junior Ranger Program, which the kids worked on while we were there.

Here are a couple of the activities the boys did:

 

And here are some photos of the day:

Memory Work:

Except for a few new science terms and new French and Latin vocabulary words, we haven't added anything to memory work for a while.

Language Arts:

We just read the last chapter in Paragraph Town and the boys have been learning what it means to write a good paragraph.  I had them attempt to write a well organized paragraph, with a topic sentence about any subject of their choosing, and here's what I got:

I actually thought these were not bad paragraphs from the two kids who hate writing more than anything.  Obviously, I need to buy some lined paper.  That might help with the handwriting.  Possibly.  I won't hold my breath.

We worked on some more 4 part analysis of sentences:

And we did some more worksheets about language mechanics:

Remind me why I introduced this kid to e. e. cummings.

 


We've done a few spelling units, and continued to plug away at the cursive handwriting book.

 

For reading, I've had them read several non fiction books about varying subjects.  I have them all listed in my 2012-2013 Reading post.  We are on the last disc of Jefferson's Sons and I have another audiobook lined up for when we've finished.  Should be any day now.  The boys also read James and The Giant Peach for book club.  I had read it to them about 3 years ago, but they enjoyed reading it themselves this time around.

Math:

The Measurement book has been fun lately. 

Apparently, this one wasn't so fun.  Check out the name at the top.

This activity was great.  Below are the pictures they drew "to scale" for this worksheet.  I wish I could have included the ones that took more than one sheet.

Math U See has become a little more interesting lately, too:

 

 

Finding the area of a trapezoid, learning expanded notation, starting division with remainders, and reviewing a bunch of stuff!  Check out Andrew's commentary on the top of the last page.

History:

There is so much to cover in Story of the World, that it's impossible to get it all done in the standard 36 weeks of school, unless you do nothing but history.  That's why we always work on it into the summer.  But, since becoming so behind, I've been really working on getting in as many history lessons as we can.  We've powered through several chapters in the last month.  We're now at the tail end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's.  We are reading a couple of chapter books that are set in some of the places we've learned about- The Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark and Nory Ryan's Song by Patricia Reilly.

 


 

When we learned about the Young Bulgarians, we did a little project making Martenitsas. You can read about the Bulgarian tradition of Martenitsas in this video.

Science:

We've read chapters 6-9 in our RS4K Physics book.  We have read a few more chapters in the Basher Physics book, as well as several sections about electricity and waves in the Usborne Science Encyclopedia.

We did Experiment 6 in the Lab Book, which worked very well:

We learned how electrons will travel from the surface of one object and create a charge in another object.

We've had some snafus with experiments 7 & 8, so I need to see if we can do them at another time by switching out some of the materials that weren't working.


French and Latin:

In French, Chapter 6 was a review chapter, so I gave them a test on what we've covered so far this year.  Neither of them were able to conjugate être, so since the test, we've been taking more time on verbs.  We started Chapter 7, which is all about regular -er verbs.

 

In Latin, we learned about -are verb endings in the present tense.  We are moving through the book and the boys are retaining more and more of the vocabulary.

The story of Echo and Narcissus was in the book, and here's Andrew's version of the story:

Logic:

We're doing deduction activities from our Connections book.

 

And yes, Eddie is now going by the alias Maverick.

Health:

We finally made our lobe helmets.  This was a messy, but enjoyable, project.

We finished up the nervous system and moved on to the digestive system.  Here's the version of the digestive system that we labeled:

Yes, we had a lot of goofy boy laughing while writing the word anus.

Then we learned about the body's pH level and how we should try to maintain a slightly alkaline body to be in good health.  We bought pH test strips that you swipe through your urine stream (big fun!), and we discovered that Mom is the only alkaline resident of the household (big surprise, there!).  So, we looked at the chart in our health book and found the foods we had been eating recently to see where they fell on the chart.  Then, the boys each wrote a list of foods of which they could eat more to try to elevate their pH levels.

 

P.E. we definitely have covered at co-op with fencing and sport stacking.

Art:

Since we're not doing the Willoughby Arts Center anymore, I've done a couple of art projects with them here at home, both of which I found on Pinterest, of course.

These were done by painting over a cardstock cut out, then removing it.  Watercolors can get under the cardstock pretty easily when you use a lot of water.

To do this project, you make a design with school glue on paper, then pour salt over the glue.  Then, you touch watercolors gently onto the salt and watch the color spread.  Eddie used black paint on his salt, which turned a kind of gray.  We do have these hanging up in the school room, but they sluff off a lot of salt, so beware!

Music:

We have done no music since the Willoughby Center.  I'm putting this here to remind myself that I wanted to start them back up on the recorder.  Need to add that to the lesson plans!