Update week of 11/18/2013

Another 2 weeks have come and gone and so I thought I would update what we have been up to before he start a week off for Thanksgiving.

In history N. has been learning about the Roaring 20's, Amelia Earhart,Louis Armstrong and the rise of Stalin among other things.  Two weeks ago he was finishing up learning about WWI and for Draw and Write Through History he drew the Red Baron's plane.  He worked so hard at drawing this and I was so impressed with his drawing.  He did use a ruler since drawing straight lines with a hand tremor is pretty difficult.  Even holding a ruler while trying to draw can be a challenge.

In story time we finished the book "War Horse" which is a fantastic book and started "Gladys Alyward". N. enjoys books about missionaries so he is looking forward to this one.

In Science he continues with the Elements.  He did an experiment with red food coloring and bleach and he made element baseball cards.

The variety of hands on activities has really helped him to become familiar with some of the more common elements and what they are used for.

In literature he finished Dust of the Earth.  We are not doing DITHOR this year since he had finished the student workbook last year, but he is reading some of the books and we discuss them and talk about some of the literary elements like conflict and foreshadowing. 

He continues to push himself to write longer and longer written narrations, which is good since that is required next year.  He still has some difficulty catching his errors when he proof reads it so we are still working on that.

This week when he had to pick his quote from Worthy Words to copy I took Julie's advice and told him to concentrate on picking the best quote that he felt covered a main idea and then if it was long he could type it.  He did a good job picking the quote and it was long so he typed it.

The only bump in the road has been Algebra.  I still think Teaching Textbooks is a good fit for him, but he has just reached the point in Algebra where the problems are hard and require him to write out so many steps to solve.  He writes all the steps, but it does wear him out and math takes at least an hour for him to do.  He had a little trouble understanding mixture problems this week so when we restart we may "sit" there a while and I will use problems from other books I have on hand to give him extra practice.

Update for the week of November 4, 2013

N. had another good week.  As depressing as I think modern times can be to study, he seems to like it.  It is the type of kid that does much better learning something if he has heard of it before so since he has heard of many of these wars and these rulers that could be why he likes it.

In history he learned about WWI and this is the first war that he ever found interesting.  We started reading War Horse for our story time and he can't wait to see what happens the next day.  Of course he also likes the fact that I keep ending up choked up by the time we finish our reading for the day. 

One of his biggest challenges this year has been doing the oral narration when I am supposed to type it.  I first tried letting him record it into his ipod and that was a disaster.  It was as if he had test anxiety.  He stuttered and stammered and got frustrated and went back to his habit of not giving many details.  So now I am typing while he narrates.  His narrations are much slower and methodical and lack much personality, but they are improved from the way we were doing them.  Right now he is looking back at the reading more than he should so I am encouraging him to look for names etc and then to look up and try and narrate.  It is funny because when he orally narrates the other weeks where I am not typing it he doesn't look at the book near as much and his narrations are better.

His history project this week was a salt painting.  Not sure it worked out exactly like it was supposed to, but he did get the paint to follow the salt line.

His nature journal assignment was to draw fall leaves of which we have plenty right now.  You might wonder about the blue leaf.  We do have a pear tree where the leaves are almost a red-purple in color right now.  I think that is what he was trying to capture.  He added more typing after I took this picture and I think he is finding he actually enjoys journaling, as long as he can type it.

For Science he had the option of making a periodic table pillowcase from fabric paint or playing the periodic table game we had learned last week.  There is no way either one of us would tackle that pillowcase so he played the game with his dad.

He is doing Teaching Textbooks Algebra and that is going well.  I know some people think it is light, but we are using the 2.0 version which is more challenging and I find it is going at just the right pace for him.  I do add in some additional story problems sometimes.

Update 10/28/2013

N. continues to just sail right along in MTMM.  He seems to find this period of history more interesting than some he has studied.  He usually dislikes studying wars, but for some reason WWI caught his interest.  I think it is because we have both really enjoyed reading "Angel in the Square" for story time.  He understands more of what all was going on politically during this time period thanks to that book.

He drew a U-boat for Draw and Write Through History. He loves doing those.  You can also see that his narrations are getting quite lengthy.  He continues to do his own timeline labeling.  His copywork got off to a rough start as he forgot to do cursive for the first few words.  Sometimes those glitches in his processing just sneak in there.  He obviously became aware and fixed it so it doesn't serve any purpose to make him redo it.  He is pretty good at coming up with bulleted points about a person or topic thanks to his training in previous guides.

In Science he is working through The Elements and he is learning so much.  My dh is an engineer and loved science, but hated Chemistry.  N. shows him each night what he learned and my dh says he might have liked chemistry if someone had ever taken the time to explain things the way The Elements does.  I can see how it is laying a strong foundation for Physical Science next year and then Chemistry.  Here he is figuring out how many protons and neutrons certain atoms have.

One of his history projects 2 weeks ago was to make Sopapillas.  His dad made them with him at night.  I am finding that there is great benefit in having dh do even 1 thing a week with him.  It doesn't always work out that way, but if it does they both seem to enjoy it and learn more about each other from doing it. 

Now for a few pictures that aren't HOD related, but they were a big part of his week.  N. is very into the sport of parkour so his jack-o-lantern had to be parkour related.  He carved this all by himself after I cut the pattern out on my Silhouette die-cutting machine.

I know celebrating Halloween is controversial among Christians, but we do carve pumpkins and when he was younger he wore costumes that were not scary and went trick or treating.  This year he wanted to dress up as Uncle Si from Duck Dynasty (his favorite show) and hand out candy to the little kids.  He was so funny and he looked just like Uncle Si sitting on the porch with his tea glass.