Sunday, August 16, 2009

Week 2 in CTG

Bible: We continued work on our memory verse, then read about The Fall, Cain and Abel, and Noah. The fun part is this is lining up exactly with what the children are learning in Sunday School and what our pastors are preaching about in church. I love it when God works things out like this.

History: We're studying the same topics as in Bible for History. We looked at the Jewish calendar to compare how it lines up with our solar calendar. Rabbit made some notebooking pages. One day, I wrote her narration and she drew the picture. The other days, she copied what I wrote down for her. We also added Noah to our timeline. One day, we went out and measured the length of the ark. It would just about go from one end of our street to the other. Maybe short by 50 feet.

Here's a picture, no zoom applied, of the length of the ark (the little white circle is where our starting point):


Then I zoomed in so you could really see the flag:


Our street is slightly curved, so it is a little misleading. We stayed on the sidewalk to measure, so we curved as we walked. My guess is the ark would have filled our street, end to end, and sat on top of the houses.

Science: I really don't like it when science experiments don't work. First we tried making the glowing hand on the T.V. We have an old CRT style TV in the basement (that is plugged in). (I'm pretty sure this probably wouldn't work on an LCD TV). It's pretty dark down there, but there is one window on the north side of the house that lets in some light. So, we tried this, and barely saw the glowing hand for 1/2 a second. I'm guessing it wasn't dark enough.

The second experiment was difficult because, as far away as we could get from the TV, the remote still worked. However, we tried blocking the remote with our hand, and that worked. One thing we noticed, when we got close to the TV (about 1.5 feet), our hand had to be totally over the end of the remote. If we were more than 1/2 a centemeter away from the bulb on the remote, the TV would turn on. So, that was kind of wierd.

Math: Rabbit moved on to Lesson 29 in Beta. It's a pretty easy lesson. She even did one of the pages all by herself this week.

English: I just love how Intermediate Language Lessons works. Rabbit has managed the lessons pretty well. We've still done most of them orally.

Writing: We finished up Exercise 1 by having Rabbit do the same thing with a different starter sentence. She dictated to me and I wrote on the white board, pointing out punctuation and capitalization. We read through Exercise 2, Day 1 and discussed it a little bit. I found my notes from mfwrocks, so I think we'll discuss a few more things this next week based on those notes.

Vocabulary: Learning the Greek roots has been easy so far - but it is only 2 words. I've been trying to guide Rabbit in how to write good sentences with the words. Looking some of the derivatives up in the dictionary has been very good practice.

Art/Music: Rabbit has enjoyed God and the History of Art this week, as it was all drawing lessons. We learned some about Vivaldi for music. He was a busy man, that is for sure.

Reading: The 4th grade level Pathway reader has been a hit. We read a story a day. If it is short, we'll work some of the workbook. If it is long, then we skip the workbook. I don't think the workbook is really necessary, but it does give good practice on vocabulary words and usage.

Foreign Language: We starting using The Easy Spanish this week. The way it is designed is for 5 days a week, but I'm only using it 3. On Monday we listen to the story and vocabulary, and do one of the activities or worksheets suggested in the manual. On Wednesday (this may have to shift to Tuesday once Dance class starts), we listen to the story and vocabulary, and do a "Yo Soy!" activity. Then on Thursday, we listen to the story and vocabulary one more time, and then she narrates back to me what the story was about. Very relaxed, very Charlotte Mason. The characters in the stories are Christians and home schooled. We like it so far.

Read Aloud: We started The Tanglewoods' Secret this week, reading a chapter a day. So far we're enjoying it. The chapters are very short, making it for a quick read.

A couple of days this week we started late. But, I really worked hard to start by 8:30 the rest of the days. I think if we could start by 8:00 am we would actually be done with everything but math by 12:00. It is a goal I am hoping to hit.

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