Homeschool Update

English

Elf and Emperor have been reviewing subjects and predicates, using a thesaurus, and writing a "personal narrative" of late. Don't forget to comment on their blogs if you haven't already! They are also in the process of writing about what they think would happen if they were in charge of writing a sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth. I'm NOT allowed to view the authors' works in progress, but they've been pretty busy. We're learning to write the names of the books of the Bible correctly this year as part of our spelling curriculum. A few other words Elf has trouble with are included each week. Elf is a great reader, so whoever came up with this idea that great readers are always great spellers... is wrong. Elf is a great speller "in progress," ok?

Maths

We will continue working on long division and multiplication until we've mastered it. Even if it takes until June. And even if using a calculator is easier. The noogies are tough, guys.

Social Studies

Wrapping up our Lifepac on "seaport cities." Sydney, Hong Kong, Istanbul and London were covered. Did you know that you can see the Gettysburg Bible in London, or that the London Blitz is the oldest part of the city, or that the BBC is the English Channel? I swear I taught them properly. I won't even, even get into this idea that "Constantinople" is the guy who influenced Chinese history with his wise sayings. They KNOW the answer when they get a few choices named on quizzes, but don't always come up with the um, exact correct name of everything on their own. They demonstrate *just* enough to show you that they were listening, but not enough to mark the answer down as correct.

Science

We did some work on weather in December and even made a thermometer with water instead of mercury. It didn't work so well, though... We'll be discussing food chains and that sort of stuff in our next unit. First, we are going to surf around on the web and look up things that we feel like learning for a bit. :)

Reading

We've finished Robin Hood, Heidi, Journey to the Center of the Earth and are beginning 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Tonight we began by learning that a league is about three miles. So... 60,000 miles under the surface of the ocean. Plausible... Elf and Emperor think that since the sea creature described at the beginning of the book has a long sword-like nose, that it would like to make Captain Nemo a "shish-kebab."

Well. Maybe they were paying attention in social studies after all, as this dish was discussed when we covered the culture of Istanbul. Awww.

Of course, within 30 seconds, the boys were talking about how it would rightly be a "nose-kebab" on one of these creatures and began discussing how the other sea creatures would be eating their dinners off its nose, and how funny that is (*hee hee heeeeeee* Elf giggles), and who gets the drumsticks.

Sick, sick, sick.

Bible

We are officially backslidden as we have done very little in our Bible curriculum over the last month.

Music and Art

We made a diorama of the Journey to the Center of the Earth, complete with a giant tree, mushrooms, strange sea creatures and Captain Hook. (Well, he's sort of making a cameo appearance. It really has nothing to do with the book.)

In music, Patrick is doing some teaching, and then the children practice what they have learned. *whew* That was worth a $5 lesson. Yep.