Update for the week of 12/10/2012

We finished week 16 or Rev to Rev this week.  Lots of fun in this week.

In Science he continues to experiment with magnets and he made an electromagnet.  He has read about electromagnets in his Michael Faraday book and others so it was nice for him to see how one actually worked.

In the inventor study he finished reading about Eli Whitney and moved on to Elias Howe and the invention of the sewing machine. I think he struggled with totally understanding this reading because I do not sew at all.  I am not sure he has even ever seen a sewing machine in use.  Pitiful huh?

His history project this week was Napoleon cookies. His daddy worked from home one day this week so he helped him roll them out.  They were pretty messy to make, but boy did they taste good. I did help him some with the icing around the edges.  He didn't like the fact that his lines were too shaky.

In keeping with his history spine "The Story of Napoleon" he drew a picture of Napoleon from Draw and Write through History.

We finished "Marie's Home" for storytime and have now started Seaman.  N. is very excited about this book.  Dogs are a passion of his and he loves the big, fluffy, drooling dog breeds like Newfoundlands. He can't wait to hear all the things Seaman does to help Lewis and Clark.  I guarantee narration with this book will not be a problem.

He is progressing along very well with dictation this year.  He usually only has to repeat one passage a week.  This is much improved over last year.  We are doing it 4 days a week and I think the consistency is important for him.

He continues to really enjoy the composer study.  Almost every week as he is putting it back on the shelf he will say something like "that is a fun study". 

We had some good discussions on the Trinity during the worldview study.  He had some deeper questions about it all so he e-mailed our youth pastor and the youth pastor took N., his son (also home schooled) and another home schooled friend all out to lunch and they had a 2 hour discussion about the Trinity. N. and the other boys were able to have their questions answered and discuss things in a mature way with the youth pastor. I love the HOD really pushes him to think deeply about spiritual matters.

Update for the week of 12/3/2012

We had a pretty smooth week this week.  N. is really in a groove now that we aren't quite half way through the year and he just moves from one thing to another getting me as needed.

In Science he finished reading about Eli Whitney.  His written narrations about Whitney were pretty good.  For the Exploration Education portion of science he is working with magnets and learning about poles, and magnetic fields.  He called me in to show me this experiment where the magnets stayed about from each other on the dowel rod.  He thought this was very cool.

This week he was assigned to draw a robin in Draw and Write through history.  He loves doing this book.  One problem was he didn't notice that he was supposed to put this drawing in Unit 16  and not Unit 15's box  which is the unit we were on.  He didn't notice it until he went to draw the White House for Unit 15's box and realized what he had done.  We talked about paying more attention to the details of the instructions.  After I took these pictures we did some copying and reducing of his robin to make it fit in the proper box and taped paper over the robin so he could start drawing his White House.

For his history project he made a Rosetta Stone with his name in hieroglyphics.  He used the computer to find the symbols to write his name.  Neither one of us realized that the Rosetta Stone is black. His stone wasn't completely dry by day 4 so he will finish it this week.

In his independent history reading he finished the book "George Washington's World".  This has been his main history spine all year.  Next he reads "The Story of Napoleon".  He is looking forward to that.

For storytime we continue to read "Marie's Home".  I think this is one of my favorite books from all our HOD years.  He also really likes it and sometimes moves storytime up earlier in the day so he can find out what happens next.