Unit two required that we do a little adjusting to the daily schedule. During week one we found it nearly impossible to finish all the boxes for each day. School wasn't ending until sometime between four and five o'clock, which is just too long of a day for us. Not to mention Bean (doing Bigger) was done closer to 2:30, making those last few hours pure misery for Bug to continue doing school.
CTC is scheduled as a 4-day week. Bigger is scheduled as a 5-day week. That was going to cause a problem anyway, so extending CTC out over all five days killed two birds with one stone. The trick was figuring out how best to move the boxes around. For example:
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
Read pg. 10 Read pg. 11 Read pg. 12 Read pg. 13
Let's pretend this is a week of assignments. If I simply took Monday's assignment and waited to do it on Friday, then Bug would be reading page 10 after she had read pages 11, 12, and 13. Instead, I needed to push one box from each day back one day. That meant on Monday, ONE box would be held until Tuesday. On Tuesday, TWO boxes would be held until Wednesday. On Wednesday, THREE boxes would be held until Thursday. On Thursday, FOUR boxes would be held until Friday. This way, we ended up with four boxes to do on Friday (effectively one box for each previous day of the week) however, they all came from the Thursday schedule, thus keeping everything in order.
I really hope that made sense.
It worked. She was able to get school completely done almost every day during unit two. We will continue to do this for the rest of the school year. Moving on...
She did a lot of work this week. If this is how much my kids have learned in just the two weeks we've been doing this program, I can't even imagine how much they are going to have learned by the time the year is done. I love it!
Bug created a cylinder seal and clay tablet out of homemade air-dry clay. This did not turn out perfectly. The clay only dried superficially and then began to break when she tried to roll it across the tablet. Also, I'm certain she was suppose to etch her name along the length of the cylinder, but instead she did in going around the middle. Oh well, she enjoyed making it (salt, flour, water) and understood the concept.
The painting, to go with The Pasture by Robert Frost, was trees/twigs (with shadows) in water. I made the mistake of showing her some finished paintings from other people's blogs and hers looks eerily similar to one of those, so from now on, we just read the directions and make our own interpretation.
This week in Writing the focus in on descriptive writing. She went through an excerpt from a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and found all the descriptive nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. I thought the different colors really helped to emphasis how much the author paints a picture in the reader's mind. The only thing I'm still waiting on, after two weeks, is the assignment where Bug actually DOES some writing of her own. :/
She must have been proud of her history notebooking this week because she asked me to take a picture of it. This week she learned about time after The Flood and the generations that lead from Noah to Abram. Man, people lived to be old back then!
For science, she did an experiment with Jell-O. The questions was, "How does humans' sense of sight affect their sense of smell?" There were two problems with this assignment: she is not ready to handle boiling water in order to prepare the Jell-O herself and we never eat Jell-O at our house, so identifying the taste was challenging.
To modify, I made the Jell-O the night before when she was in bed. This way, she did not see me altering the color of one of the bowls. You are suppose to use lemon flavored (for the light yellow color), but I only had an old box of lime in the house, so I just used a LOT of red food dye to make the color change. We did not eat this Jell-O beyond the few bites necessary for the experiment. I can't handle the thought of ingesting that much Red #40. I had Bug and Bean do the taste testing. It all worked out well. They thought the green was watermelon and the red was either strawberry or cherry.
That's just a small taste of the week. Drawn Into the Heart of Reading is going well doing the book Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. I am truly loving the book A Child's Geography and I'm learning as much about Turkey as Bug is. Somehow we squeeze math, dictation (spelling), grammar, and Bible study with devotion time into each day, also. I a week or so, I'm even hoping to start a Health class with both the girls. So much to learn!
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