Wrap Up: Week 11

Week 11 (hey, which I just realized contained the day 11-11-11) was birthday week for Dad. Monday morning, before school started, we made our handmade birthday cards. Tuesday we had to think of something sweet to make Dad since he's a cake-hater (I know, right? O, the audacity! The heresy!) We came up with some handheld apple pies from one of the vegetarian cookbooks I checked out from the library last week. They were GONE within an hour of being finished (We made sure Dad got 2.) So good. 

Kids' cooking project: Handheld apple pies... Mmmmmm.

Yeah, they look a little weird but they tasted awesome!

El was ecstatic when he heard Monday's history project: Build an Assyrian siege tower out of Legos. He didn't really know where to begin, but luckily I found another hs blogger working through SOTW and we looked at her kids' towers for inspiration. Here is El's finished tower:

On Friday, we had Em with us so she worked on some Singapore math pages, a GDI printing page, this math sentence practice page recommended by Math Mammoth's Maria Miller and some Tumblebooks.

Friday was also art day and our artist of the week was Henri Matisse. Matisse was a post-impressionist who loved COLOR so he fit right in at our house. The project from our art book was to create a Matisse colored paper collage similar to the art he was making in his later life.

Here's more of our week:

•  Spelling: We are still finishing up SP Level D. I have pulled out every missed word from this level and I'm going to re-test those words over the next couple of weeks. I've divided them into 4 sections and will re-test 17 or 18 words at a time. I know, this isn't SP protocol at all but I'm stalling a little bit before heading into Level E since E (roughly grade 6/7) looks to be much more difficult than D has been.

• Reading: For Ancients, we finished up Six Beautiful Stories of Life by Cynthia Rylant (of Henry and Mudge fame) and I think I can say it has been my favorite ancients book so far. El also flew through Book 4 of Mary Pope Osborne's Tales from the Odyssey series. We also continued on with our On the Banks of Plum Creek unit study. El also read stories about George Washington Carver and Pocahontas. The library was closed Friday so we actually didn't make it to the library last week. That's right, we didn't go to the library last week and the world didn't end! Amazing, huh?
• Grammar: Completed 3 FLL lessons and mastered memorization of the Thackary poem.
• Health, music, Latin, handwriting, sign language... the usual.
  
• Writing: Copywork, dictation, Spectrum pages... the usual. 

•  Math: Finished up Chapter 7 in Math in Focus. This means El heads into long division in the coming weeks. This also means I have 2 chapters left until I run out of math. I've got to decide what I'm doing next for math, since I don't have the full MiF 3B and I'm still not sure I want to stick with it. 
• Science: Chemistry- "enzymes, yeast, and fermentation" in our chem. experiment book and  "rock types and the rock cycle" in our other science book. We also watched some YouTube videos about rock types since I didn't happen to have a geology lab at my disposal.